First post, by Sylarito
- Rank
- Newbie
So as the title suggests, im having an extremely bad time with my XFi sound card on W10 (currently version 1909) when playing OpenAL games like Mass Effect, DOOM 3 and Bioshock. Im playing these games with HW accelerated audio enabled in their respective options menus. At any rate, what happens is that after 5-10 minutes the sound will stop in these games and the image will freeze. The system doesnt crash just yet but becomes pretty unresponsive (task manager doesnt seem to work properly for example) and 1 minute later I get a DPC WATCHDOG VIOLATION BsoD that restarts the system.
Using WhoCrashed reveals that the module responsible for the blue screen is ctaud2k.sys which belongs to the Creative Audio driver. Here is the full report:
On Tue 11/26/2019 3:56:21 AM your computer crashed or a problem was reported
crash dump file: C:\Windows\MEMORY.DMP
This was probably caused by the following module: ctaud2k.sys (ctaud2k+0x315fe)
Bugcheck code: 0x133 (0x1, 0x1E00, 0xFFFFF80032D73358, 0x0)
Error: DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION
file path: C:\Windows\system32\drivers\ctaud2k.sys
product: Creative Audio Product
company: Creative Technology Ltd
description: Creative WDM Audio Device Driver
Bug check description: The DPC watchdog detected a prolonged run time at an IRQL of DISPATCH_LEVEL or above. This could be caused by either a non-responding driver or non-responding hardware. This bug check can also occur because of overheated CPUs (thermal issue).
A third party driver was identified as the probable root cause of this system error. It is suggested you look for an update for the following driver: ctaud2k.sys (Creative WDM Audio Device Driver, Creative Technology Ltd).
Google query: ctaud2k.sys Creative Technology Ltd DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION
I've already tried the following things with no success:
- Deleting drivers (with DDU included) and reinstalling them.
- A new windows 10 install.
- Games still crash with HW accelerated audio disabled, but the manner in which it crashes is different. Sound stops as it usually does, but the game and the system are still responsive as normal. Fiddiling with audio settings afterwards causes the DPC WATCHDOG VIOLATION BsoD though.
- Disabling XRAM with Regedit produces no changes, games still crash.
- On board audio is disabled in the BIOS.
- Switched the sound card to other PCIe slots, still crashes.
My setup is as follows:
- Asus Rampage III Extreme (1601 bios)
- Intel Xeon X5675
- 12GB DDR3 1333MHz Kingston RAM
- Nvidia GTX980Ti (EVGA FTW model) (with 441.08 drivers)
- Seasonic EVO 620W PSU
- 2TB and 500GB WD HDD's
- Creative Sound Blaster XFi Titanium HD (with XFRL_PCDRV_L11_3_00_2022 drivers which provide compatibility with W10 1903 and beyond)