Any ideas guys?

1903 broke my Audigy 2 in Windows 10 so I use the integrated Realtek when I boot into 10 on on my other desktop. Not blaming Windows here since we all know how shitty Creative drivers are.
Have you tried playing the driver game?
Tried using the Windows High Definition Audio driver? Would OpenAL still work with that?

DosFreak wrote:

1903 broke my Audigy 2 in Windows 10 so I use the integrated Realtek when I boot into 10 on on my other desktop. Not blaming Windows here since we all know how shitty Creative drivers are.
Have you tried playing the driver game?
Tried using the Windows High Definition Audio driver? Would OpenAL still work with that?

First of all, thank you for answering.
Build 1903 introduced some changes to the audio subsystem in Windows 10 that broke XFi cards as well but Creative put up a patch to fix compatibility for them.
What do you mean with "playing the driver game"? use different drivers? the problem is that I need to use the latest drivers from Creative in order to get the card to work with the newest builds of W10.
With the default W10 drivers the card is recognized as "High Definition Audio Device" so im unsure as to whether HW accelerated audio would work under those terms.

I have similar issue on 190* builds, immediately getting BSOD in OpenAL games (like Quake 4 with EAX HD enabled) on my X-fi Xtreme Gamer.
In earlier builds i fixed this issue by installing older drivers from D. Kawikami (XFI SupportPack 3.8 ), but they don't work anymore in newer W10 builds.

KainXVIII wrote:

I have similar issue on 190* builds, immediately getting BSOD in OpenAL games (like Quake 4 with EAX HD enabled) on my X-fi Xtreme Gamer.
In earlier builds i fixed this issue by installing older drivers from D. Kawikami (XFI SupportPack 3.8 ), but they don't work anymore in newer W10 builds.

What kind of BSOD message are you getting? DPC WATCHDOG VIOLATION too? good to know im not the only one with the same issues. I made a thread on the SB subreddit (Creative used to have a forum which they stupidly deleted instead of restoring because they got hacked) and the users over there reported similar problems. Unfortunely no one from Creative's staff addressed the issues at hand, and so here we are.
The Dani_K packs were very stable, I dont remember having BsoD's with any of his drivers, even with 4.0. As you said, they are no longer an option due to the changes brought in Windows 10 19xx builds. It's a shame he never made a 5.0 version compatible with the newest W10 builds, that way we wouldnt need to rely on the glitchy official drivers.

I am running a X-Fi Ti HD with the current Creative drivers. And Windows is at 1909. I'm sorry to say that I haven't had any BSODs in ages. I have an 8600K on a Asrock Z370 board with a GTX 1080.

After I saw this thread I downloaded Quake 4 from Steam and gave it a few minute run with OpenAL enabled without any issues. I've also been playing SWAT 4 occasionally on there without issue and it uses OpenAL.

Actually I am using a combination of Daniel K's X-Fi 4.0 pack's apps with the official Creative drivers. The X-Fi Support Pack can be installed without its included drivers selected for install.

That DPC Watchdog violation can be caused by a number of things. I had a ASUS G750JM notebook years ago that would occasionally DPC Watchdog BSOD due to an issue with the mobile GPU and newer drivers. I don't know what variables caused that but I think NV eventually resolved it. The X-Fi BSOD could be something like an unexpected interaction with something in your particular PC build.

swaaye wrote:

I am running a X-Fi Ti HD with the current Creative drivers. And Windows is at 1909. I'm sorry to say that I haven't had any BS […]
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I am running a X-Fi Ti HD with the current Creative drivers. And Windows is at 1909. I'm sorry to say that I haven't had any BSODs in ages. I have an 8600K on a Asrock Z370 board with a GTX 1080.

After I saw this thread I downloaded Quake 4 from Steam and gave it a few minute run with OpenAL enabled without any issues. I've also been playing SWAT 4 occasionally on there without issue and it uses OpenAL.

Actually I am using a combination of Daniel K's X-Fi 4.0 pack's apps with the official Creative drivers. The X-Fi Support Pack can be installed without its included drivers selected for install.

That DPC Watchdog violation can be caused by a number of things. I had a ASUS G750JM notebook years ago that would occasionally DPC Watchdog BSOD due to an issue with the mobile GPU and newer drivers. I don't know what variables caused that but I think NV eventually resolved it. The X-Fi BSOD could be something like an unexpected interaction with something in your particular PC build.

Hmm interesting. I want to point out though, that outside of the games I mentioned which happen to be OpenAL games I have no BsoD's in the desktop or in newer games.
I have my drivers set up exactly the same way. Audio driver and Audio Control Panel come from the official Creative drivers, while the rest of the software like Console Launcher and the like come from the Dani_K 4.0 pack.
I wonder what it could be though. Is Quake 4 and Swat 4 the only OpenAL game you have? how long was your gaming session? Mass Effect and DOOM 3 usually crash for me after around 5 minutes more or less.

Sylarito wrote:

KainXVIII wrote:

I have similar issue on 190* builds, immediately getting BSOD in OpenAL games (like Quake 4 with EAX HD enabled) on my X-fi Xtreme Gamer.
In earlier builds i fixed this issue by installing older drivers from D. Kawikami (XFI SupportPack 3.8 ), but they don't work anymore in newer W10 builds.

What kind of BSOD message are you getting? DPC WATCHDOG VIOLATION too? good to know im not the only one with the same issues. I made a thread on the SB subreddit (Creative used to have a forum which they stupidly deleted instead of restoring because they got hacked) and the users over there reported similar problems. Unfortunely no one from Creative's staff addressed the issues at hand, and so here we are.
The Dani_K packs were very stable, I dont remember having BsoD's with any of his drivers, even with 4.0. As you said, they are no longer an option due to the changes brought in Windows 10 19xx builds. It's a shame he never made a 5.0 version compatible with the newest W10 builds, that way we wouldnt need to rely on the glitchy official drivers.

Something like that "Driver IRQL not less or equal in ha20x2k.sys"

Sylarito wrote:

I wonder what it could be though. Is Quake 4 and Swat 4 the only OpenAL game you have? how long was your gaming session? Mass Effect and DOOM 3 usually crash for me after around 5 minutes more or less.

I am not entirely sure how much OpenAL time that PC has had on the current Xfi driver but I have been using that PC for games since the driver was released for 1903. I've been playing SWAT 4 sporadically since early this year. Some sessions were at least an hour.

I will try some other OpenAL games when I get a chance. I have more. 😀 I do have Mass Effect and Doom3.

Doom3 has a visual twitch issue with OpenAL/EAX enabled though. The screen periodically shifts for a split second. I think it might be better to use its Surround sound mode.

Mass Effect used to have some PC sound problems too IIRC. I think 5.1 output was very messed up.

swaaye wrote:

I am not entirely sure how much OpenAL time that PC has had on the current Xfi driver but I have been using that PC for games si […]
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Sylarito wrote:

I wonder what it could be though. Is Quake 4 and Swat 4 the only OpenAL game you have? how long was your gaming session? Mass Effect and DOOM 3 usually crash for me after around 5 minutes more or less.

I am not entirely sure how much OpenAL time that PC has had on the current Xfi driver but I have been using that PC for games since the driver was released for 1903. I've been playing SWAT 4 sporadically since early this year. Some sessions were at least an hour.

I will try some other OpenAL games when I get a chance. I have more. 😀 I do have Mass Effect and Doom3.

Doom3 has a visual twitch issue with OpenAL/EAX enabled though. The screen periodically shifts for a split second. I think it might be better to use its Surround sound mode.

Mass Effect used to have some PC sound problems too IIRC. I think 5.1 output was very messed up.

If you can try ME and DOOM 3 I would appreciate it. As it stands, those games are currently unplayable for me with this sound card.

I played about 30 mins of Doom3 with EAX enabled and it didn't crash. I wonder if your X-Fi card could be defective. It also might be worthwhile to try other PCIe slots.

swaaye wrote:

I played about 30 mins of Doom3 with EAX enabled and it didn't crash. I wonder if your X-Fi card could be defective. It also might be worthwhile to try other PCIe slots.

Is it possible for the sound card to be defective if everything else outside of these OpenAL applications works fine? im not saying you're wrong, but im inclined to believe that the problem lies elsewhere (I am starting to run out of ideas though 😒). I did mention in the OP about switching the card to other PCIe slots and it didint work, it still crashes.

Okay, so I may have found the culprit here.
In the OP I mentioned that I have two WD Blue HDD's. A 2TB and a 500GB. The 2TB HDD is pretty new, got it last year if I recall correctly. The 500GB HDD is really, really old (10 years old more or less) and it's health has deteriorated in the last two years. Crystal Disk Info reports that it's health is in the "caution" state as its running out of healthy sectors. At any rate I didint care much for it as my main HDD was the 2TB one, and 500GB of extra space could come in handy at some point, so I left it connected to the motherboard as an spare HDD.
Since I was running out of ideas trying to solve my issues with the sound card I decided to unplug the bad HDD as a last resort, then tried the games. I was able to run ME for nearly an hour without a single crash, then tried DOOM3 and beat an entire level without crashes! further testing is required of course, but initial results look extremely promising.
I dont have time right now, but im gonna be playing ME for a few hours tonight to see if removing the faulty HDD was the solution to this issue. Fingers crossed!

EDIT: I may have celebrated a little too early. Games still crash as normal. All of D3, ME and Bioshock crashed for me after removing the bad HDD (D3 takes the longest to crash for some reason). At this point I have completely run out of ideas so I guess its posible that the card is defective even though everything else works as it should.

With OpenAL in use the card will be using its hardware processing to more of a degree than otherwise. Channel mixing, 3D and EAX effect processing, onboard RAM use too. Probably more PCIe activity as well.

If I were having BSOD problems with my XFi Ti HD card I would swap in my plain XFi Ti card and see if it did the same crashing. Maybe you can find one of those for cheap if you looking around.

I have an X-Fi elite pro - a pci card with an external module. I have no problems with it running latest windows 10 build with the updated creative drivers (I'm also using that pci to pcie chinese conversion kit made specifically for the card. AXF-117 or something like that) except crackling when using dts encoder. But I can live without it. I also have the DanielK driverpack installed on top of the drivers.

My system is i6700k with MSI Z270 Pro SLI and a Geforce 1080ti.

Also it so happens that just right now my wife is running through first ME with hardware audio enabled so I would've noticed.

Maybe something's wrong with your system OAL driver installation? Have you checked ME logs to see what's exactly being initialized?

I'd also like to point out that even though my card is a bit different from yours, I've also replaced XFi titanium PCIE not so long ago with it and I also haven't had any issues with it in games (even after 1903)

PS: a lot of alsos!

The problem seems to be on my end actually. I realized because I made a list of the games that crash and dont crash and I noticed that all the games that do crash have high GPU usage. Some older games with HW accelerated audio dont crash, while newer games with no acceleration at all crash. Then I decided to try to lower resolution and all graphical settings in those games while keeping EAX enabled and to my suprise the sound card didint crash once, so it looks like its not about the XFi being pushed, its about the GPU being pushed that ends up crashing the sound card for whatever reason. Not enough power being suplied or maybe the card getting too hot? I did notice that my Rampage III Extreme has these two EZ_PLUGS for 4pin molex cables that provide more energy to the PCIe slots but if I understand correctly they're ment for multiple GPU's configurations.

Hello,

I have been facing BSOD's DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION 0133 on the Kernel, caused by, a sudden stop of AUDIO only in fullscreen 3D Rendered Applications ever since November this year. I Updated from Windows 10 1809 to 1903 without any issues, except having to reset the Control Panel on the first run due to no sound at all. Then When the update to version 1909 became available in my updates list, I guess around November this year? I started to have this subtle at first problem. I say subtle because usually I play with wireless headphones and I did not realize at first that my Sound Card had stopped way before I wanted to turn the computer to Sleep or Off.

SYSTEM CONFIG:
Corsair Obsidian 750D
Corsair AX1200i
ASUS TUF X299 MARK 1
Intel Core i9 7920X @ Stock
Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 3000 MHz XMP 8 x 8 GB @stock
PCIe x16 3.0_1 (@x16) ASUS GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
PCIE x4 3.0_1 (@x1) Creative X-Fi Titanium HD
PCIE x16 3.0_2 (@16) ASUS GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
PCIE x4 3.0_2 (@x4) - EMPTY BECAUSE USING IT TAKES 4 SATA PORTS AWAY
PCIE x16 3.0_4 (@x4) INTEL 750 SERIES 400 GB SSD

The PCIe 3.0 x4_1 (@x1) and the PCIe 3.0 x16_3 (@8 MAX) share bandwidth I do believe I am not running out of bandwidth for the Sound Card.

((Skip to Step 9 if you want to read my solution straight away))

1. The first symptom of something wrong was my computer taking ages to sleep or shut down and instead of doing that, it would reboot.
2. While in games and ignoring the sound card while I used the headphones... I would notice a huge decrease for a couple of seconds in performance and return to normal. (something like being playing at 80/s FPS and dropping to 1-4 FPS for a couple of seconds.
3. When I finally noticed I had no sound after opening a game, it was probably one of the days I actually wanted to play and listen through the speakers.
4. I realized that simply uninstall and install of Drivers, no matter what version or source would fix this.
5. I isolated the actions from opening the 3D application to DTS /DD encoders stopping working altogether, me through the control panel trying to turn them off or reset the driver, and the system completely coming to WPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION after some seconds.
6. I tried so many installs I had to format my computer yesterday to Windows 1903, to find it broken on the first run of a 3D application.
7. After a couple of installs, I decided to reset the PC (while I still did not have many programs installed) and install the Official Driver, after which I installed Windows 1909 (almost giving up hope of ever fixing this)
8. After Swapping the Sound Card with my PCIe SSD, it would not Crash at all times, although it would not crash, my SSD became was way Slower (from 3GB/s to 740 MB/s) but still, in case the problem was coming from high temps because it was between to GPUS (for so long, since 2017) I bought a PCIe Riser Cable to help me position it in the same port on a different position in the cassis, to no avail it kept failing me.

9. Before re-installing the control panel again, I noticed just after cleaning the PC, that there was this OpenAL thing installed on my computer... I had no idea what this was up until yesterday and after searching it I found it was something from the old days from when games actually used EAX and hardware accelerators (like you guys are talking about here) for Audio in Games... Thinking this thing is even older than my Sound Card (more than 11 years old since it was last updated) so I decided to remove OpenAL today completely from the computer.

10. For the Last Benchmarks and Games, the sound card has been working without any error. I will keep testing until I build my trust in this solution.

I thought of writing here to help someone that is as lost as I was.

DETAIL UPDATE; It would crash with and without decoders DTS/DD on, using it as a passthrough to Optical Output ( I never used analog connectors in this card so I do not know for sure the problem is not the decoder. I also notice that I never had any other problem with any other sound device in the system. Last but not least I never used the EAX filter with the card. as I said I did not even know about Open AL or the EAX porpoise up until yesterday. I purchased this Sound Card for one porpoise alone, THX on my Speakers, so I use it from the Decoders to external Speakers that are also THX certified.

Cheers

Sylarito wrote on 2019-12-06, 21:06:

The problem seems to be on my end actually. I realized because I made a list of the games that crash and dont crash and I noticed that all the games that do crash have high GPU usage. Some older games with HW accelerated audio dont crash, while newer games with no acceleration at all crash. Then I decided to try to lower resolution and all graphical settings in those games while keeping EAX enabled and to my suprise the sound card didint crash once, so it looks like its not about the XFi being pushed, its about the GPU being pushed that ends up crashing the sound card for whatever reason. Not enough power being suplied or maybe the card getting too hot? I did notice that my Rampage III Extreme has these two EZ_PLUGS for 4pin molex cables that provide more energy to the PCIe slots but if I understand correctly they're ment for multiple GPU's configurations.

Hey so was this a permeant fix? I started getting this porblem and nearly broke down trying to fix it and get windows help. Have exactly the same issue as you. Audio cuts out in assetto corsa pubg apex and pc crashes. I thought my card might be broken and since its 2-5$ used might aswell buy another one but found this thread and trying my luck here.