I wanted to describe something I've noticed with the two Dark Engine games I play a lot, Thief Gold and System Shock 2.

Unlike my problem with Star Control II and the Gravis UltraSound, this isn't a do-or-die thing, more just a curiosity. (Again, super-mega-thanks to everyone who helped with that issue. I couldn't be happier.)

I have a system that I enhanced for Win98 gaming: a stock Dell Dimension XPS D333 that I took from a Deschutes P2-333 to a Mendocino Celeron-500 (highest I could go with the 440LX chipset's 66-MHz FSB would be a Coppermine Celeron-766, I believe), 64 MB to 128 MB RAM, Turtle Beach Montego to a Sound Blaster Live!, ATI Xpert 98 to an ATI Xpert 98 with Voodoo2 SLI.

As expected, it runs Glide games like Quake 2 and Unreal flawlessly. (Even Deus Ex, a game notorious for being poorly optimized, runs acceptably in Glide mode.) Half-Life with the 3dfx OpenGL Minidriver is buttery-smooth. Where I start seeing a small performance issue is with Thief and SS2 - and only when I have the sound enabled. With sound, there's slight but noticeable graphical stuttering when just moving around, like walking through streets or tunnels. Without sound, the stuttering vanishes and everything is as perfectly smooth as the other games.

At first I thought the problem was EAX. But this didn't make much sense to me, because as I understood it, the majority of the processing for EAX occurred on the SBLive! card. Nevertheless, I tested several times with and without EAX, with some interesting results. The long and the short of it was that stuttering was present in either case, but with EAX, it seemed to line up more with where EAX effects would change in the environment - like at the fork of a tunnel, where the reverb setting would change. Nudging down the resolution from 1024x768 to 800x600 made no difference. It appeared to be all about the sound. With sound completely off, graphics were smooth.

EAX adds a lot to both Thief and SS2, so I'm not willing to disable it, let alone disable sound altogether. Although I've beefed up the machine a lot from its original state, I've accepted that it may simply not be fast enough for optimal performance of the EAX + Dark Engine combo... even though that doesn't make much sense according to my understanding of how EAX works.

I guess I'm looking to gather opinions about the issue and what I might do to alleviate it, even though it's not critical. The stuttering isn't bad enough to seriously disrupt my experience in either game. One of the first things I considered was maxing out the CPU, to that Coppermine Celeron-766. Not the easiest thing, mainly because of the difficulty in obtaining a slotket with adjustable voltage, but... *shrug* Could it be the 66 MHz FSB that's screwing me over somehow?