Sound Lag: Fedora Core 3: KDE and Gnome

Gryphon · Post by **Gryphon** » Thu Apr 21, 2005 12:58 am

Just like the title says. SEVERE sound lag in FC3, KDE and Gnome. Almost a second behind the game, which makes it unbearable.

At first I thought it was my sound card (SB Live 5.1) or system (AMD T-Bird 900,) so I didn't bother messing with it and just used Openbox for a GUI which doesn't have the issue. I just recently bought a new system (AMD 64 3400+) with a completely different sound card (onboard VIA sound) and the issue persists.

I've looked all over the web for this issue, because it doesn't just happen in Armagetron; I had sound lag issues in XMMS until I changed it from ArtsD to OSS, and in Doom3 until I set it to use OSS as well. I've tried changing the buffer length for Arts down to almost nothing, with no effect, and changing the native sound server to OSS and ALSA in the KDE control panel.

Does anyone know what this is all about? I'm sure it's something n00bish that I just didnt' google for correctly. Maybe there's some compile-time options I missed?

Post by **Lucifer** » Thu Apr 21, 2005 1:01 am

Yeah, if you eat beans, you will fArtsd.

I shut off Arts when I do serious work with sound. It's funny when you click something and it takes a second and a half to hear the click.

Arts is a program that only delivers on one of its promises: it allows all applications to make sound at the same time. However, ALSA does it too and is alsa low latency.

ALSA rules.

tgrey · Post by **tgrey** » Thu Apr 21, 2005 3:18 am

i'm pretty sure alsa only provides that capability on cards that support hardware mixing, one of which is the sb live (probably the best choice too)

es1370 and 1371 cards will not have be able to do multiple sound sources (tho one of the two will give you 2 /dev/dsp's, but i forget which)

Post by **Lucifer** » Thu Apr 21, 2005 3:23 am

No, there's the alsa daemon that I think came out with the 1.1 series. I could be wrong about when it came out, but it's out. Now, ALSA doesn't support mixing all these different sound streams when some are using the oss emulation layer, if I recall correctly.

tgrey · Post by **tgrey** » Thu Apr 21, 2005 3:27 am

interesting, i didn't know they added that. perhaps my problem was the oss compatability layer (some of the bizarre audio programs i use i KNOW don't support alsa native)

Gryphon · Post by **Gryphon** » Thu Apr 21, 2005 3:22 pm

I just tried disabling the sound system altogether..of course, no sound. After I launched the game I launched XMMS (which I presume fired up some OSS daemon) because I then got sound. Perfectly synched with the game. Yay!

But then after playing for about 1/2 an hour the sound started lagging out again.

Website · Post by **Z-Man** » Sat Apr 23, 2005 10:27 am

Have you tried forcing SDL to use the native alsa driver? You can do so by starting AA with

Code: Select all

SDL_AUDIODRIVER=alsa armagetronad

Things like that, when they turn out to be useful, can also be implemented in the game itself.