I'm trying to run Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness with surround sound.
The setup is: WinXP, GeForce GTX 750 (latest drivers that don't ruin graphics stuff), HDMI audio, game v52.

This leads to two problems:

* The game stutters. There are framerate hiccups when SFX is triggered.
* Speech is too quick, both in speed and pitch. Music and SFX are fine.

Tweaking the few game audio options don't help. The stutters can be fixed by disabling audio hardware acceleration thru Windows' Audio Properties or DXDIAG, but then it's only stereo rather than 5.1 (of the four acceleration levels only 0/disabled helps).

The game works fine with hardware accelerated Realtek audio. An obvious difference in Nvidia's HDMI sound driver is that it doesn't support hardware buffers, as indicated both by the game settings and DXDIAG (this wasn't a problem with other games so far).

Any ideas?

Game settings shows Nvidia HDMI audio has no hardware buffers, unlike Realtek:

DXDIAG agrees about Nvidia's HDMI audio providing no hardware buffers: