Stuttering audio and dropouts after installing new graphics card...

Unfortunately I've noticed that it's hit or miss with an NVidia card, that's why I stay with Radeon...
Did you install all the extra crap besides the drivers?

Thanks for the responses, guys.
 
Yeah, I was sure to only install the driver itself and leave out the 3D, PhysX, and GeForce Experience add-ons.
 

gustabo
I've noticed that it's hit or miss with an NVidia card, that's why I stay with Radeon...
 

Unfortunately, my options were fairly limited - I needed something decent (mostly for another program on my computer), affordable, and that would fit within the confines of a slim tower (low profile) PC. This card was pretty well rated, and at a doable price for me. I wasn't anticipating any issues between it and Sonar.
 
Any chance things would behave any differently in SPlat than in X3?

Hi scook,
 
Yeah, I disabled everything pertaining to High Definition Audio in the Device Manager. Did that right after I installed the video card, before I even noticed any problems.

dimelives1
 
Any chance things would behave any differently in SPlat than in X3?

The only definitive way to find out is to try the Splat Demo....

rontarrant
I've gone around a few times with this one and found the best way to deal with nVidia cards is to:

• do a clean install every time
  • under Options, select "Custom",
  • in "Custom Install Options,"
    • click the box next to "Perform a clean installation" (under the boxed area)
    •  deselect HD Audio Drivers (do this as well as disabling them in System Manager)
    • deselect 3D Vision Driver

That should stop most of the interference and here's a guide.
 
You may still have to mess around with background vs. foreground tasks here's another guide for that.
 
Hope this helps.

Thank you for the suggestions, Ron. Your time and effort is very much appreciated.
 
I followed your advice to a T, even with one of the first drivers compatible with this card (following Brando's input), but alas, the problems remained.

The quickest and easiest workaround that I've found so far is to just temporarily disable the driver for the card in Device Manager while working in Sonar. The only things I seem to lose visually are the Aero window transparencies and one or two other minor theme customizations (and before anyone asks, yes, I tried disabling the transparency setting itself; no change). Also, the Now Time cursor tracks a little less smoothly during playback. But at least the audio seems to play without missing a beat (no pun intended).

I've been thinking about jumping on the Platinum bandwagon for the lifetime updates. I don't see what would make a difference, and I won't get my hopes up, but it'd be lovely if the card played nicer with the new version.
 
 

chuckebaby
I find using onboard video (most Mobo's now a day support dual DVI) is less the headache.
DAW set ups are not like gaming computers, you don't need a great video card.
Even though the GT-730 isn't a great video card to begin with, your really not gaining anything by using it vs using onboard video.

 
Well, like I was getting at in a previous post, I needed the upgrade for another program (an art program that requires OpenGL, which my onboard graphics did not support). It wasn't a modification geared toward Sonar.

And the card scores 7.0's out of 7.9 in the Win Experience Index, ranks decently enough in benchmark tests, and has positive ratings online, so it can't be all that bad. A couple of years outdated, sure, but nothing I'd call downright poor, especially not for my more truly poor budget :P

My laptop's card starts working notably (it has a rather loud fan) when I have even a background tab with YouTube in it. Possibly, your browser "activates" your card? And it's in low power/sleep mode using Sonar?

Sanderxpander
My laptop's card starts working notably (it has a rather loud fan) when I have even a background tab with YouTube in it. Possibly, your browser "activates" your card? And it's in low power/sleep mode using Sonar?

 
Hmmm, interesting... I'll have to check if there's a way to adjust the card's "power mode" while using Sonar.
 
 

cool
I had a similar problem and I solved it successfully. Generally, it is known problem. Just set the maximum perfomance in the power settings:

 
Thanks for the suggestion, cool, but I've already had it set that way to help with some browser issues I was experiencing. I'll try applying the setting specifically for Sonar's program, but since it's already set this way under "Global Settings", I don't see that it will likely make a difference.

Everything seems to check out ok for me on that front, abacab, but thanks all the same for the tip.

I have also used only Nvidia cards without any issues.  Currently on an MSI GTX560ti with latest drivers as of 31 Aug 2016.  One thing I always do is disable all adjust the graphics for best performance in the system properties. (Turn off menu animations, turn off areo , etc)

Thanks for the responses, guys.
 
I'm pretty certain I don't have any viruses or anything. And I've tried turning off all the unnecessary background animations and so forth with no change to the issues experienced. And as mentioned earlier, I tried a driver from more than two years ago; again, no change.
 
The behavior only began after installing the graphics card (and additional RAM). Now the only thing that appears to make audio play smoothly (short of disabling the graphics card's driver) is having a Firefox window open in the background, as I described above.
 
I have a similar setup to promidi, just with a somewhat older CPU (which worked fine previously), a slightly newer NVidia, and with him running Platinum while I'm still on X3. I don't know if the upgrade to SPlat will make any difference with the issue, but it'd be nice...

The build comment above may be applicable. I remember 359.06 being a stable build. Nvidia began introducing another software component this year (forget the name offhand) but the first few iterations caused issues for me, so I had 359.06 for several months. If you did not specifically delete those, Nvidia leaves the installers in the appropriate sub directory. Also do not forget that a system restore is a quick fix to upgrade issues.

Sorry for the delayed response, guys. I was trying some different ideas, including some given here, and haven't had much chance to come report back on here. Long story short, the behavior still persists, to where I've gotten into the habit of just opening up a blank Firefox window when I open a project. It's a simple workaround, but a workaround nonetheless, one I wish I didn't have to do.
 
 

tlw
I know it's a hassle to open the case, but does the problem persist if you remove the new RAM?
 

 
Thanks for the suggestion. I tried removing the new RAM, as well as swapping it all around in multiple configurations, but it made no difference in any case.
 
 

tlw
Have you tried running a PCI bus latency monitoring application like latencymon to see what that reports?

 
I haven't tried that. Do you think the results from such an application would provide any insights into what could be going on?
 
 

mettelus
The build comment above may be applicable. I remember 359.06 being a stable build. Nvidia began introducing another software component this year (forget the name offhand) but the first few iterations caused issues for me, so I had 359.06 for several months. If you did not specifically delete those, Nvidia leaves the installers in the appropriate sub directory. Also do not forget that a system restore is a quick fix to upgrade issues.
 

 
Well like I said in an older post, I tried several older drivers (as old as I could find for this card), but all to no avail for the issue.
 
 

promidi
Here is an out there thought....  maybe, just maybe you have been unlucky enough to have picked up a faulty GT750 video card.  That Firefox thing certainly lends a small bit of weight to this hypothesis. 

Certainly, if it's possible, would not hurt to swap it out for another card - that is if you can find (or borrow) a comparable one to test this.
 

 
Unfortunately, I'm well past the return/exchange date for the card, and I don't currently have access to a comparable one either. I did try removing and reseating this one, but the issue remained.
 
Would you reckon it's a hardware flaw, though? The whole thing with having Firefox open to stabilize performance seems pretty software-centric to me.
 
I don't know; it's weird. But thus is the digital world, eh? :P

promidi
Does your PC motherboard have on board video?  If so, could you not remove the GTX750 and configure your system to use the on board video.

Now, of course, I am only suggesting this as a test and not as a permanent solution.  However, it is certainly worth a try just to rule out the card.  If I was an IT engineer looking at this issue on my machine, I would certainly give this try.
 

 
Yes, up until recently I had been using the onboard GPU for years with no issues like this. I needed to get the GT-730 to be able to use an unrelated program on my computer that required OpenGL support (of which my onboard graphics had none).
 
Also, like I mentioned in post #12, before I discovered the Firefox workaround, another way that I found to get Sonar running smoothly was to temporarily disable the NVIDIA's driver in Device Manager. Though I'd lose the Windows Aero effects and a few other minor visual qualities, it at least got my projects to run well.
 
So I'm pretty certain the problem is between the rest of my system and the video card, or, at the very least, its drivers (new or old).