Well, I just got the final game, and I'm continuing to suffer an issue I also had in the demo, but didn't really make much of a deal about. For some reason, the ingame playing of the bink videos has audio stutters every 10-25 seconds. The skip lasts for 1-2 seconds, while the movie continues playing normally.
I've tried Googling, and this bink issue seems to be documented as an open issue with quite a few games but doesn't seem to have a working solution. If anyone has any idea or experience with this problem from anywhere (since bink movies are pretty common) it'd be a big help.
How much memory do you have? And how fast is your hard drive and system bus?
Bink videos are dynamically decompressed and loaded into memory, buffering new data into memory from the hard drive as the movie plays. If however your hard drive or memory is slow, the video will catch up to your buffer resulting in some pauses as your PC struggles to buffer the new data.
Though many people don't realize it, playing video is very system intensive. Consoles fair better because they typically have dedicated video hardware.
512mb of DDR-SDRAM. I'm not sure on the HD speed, although I recall it being fairly decent. As for the system bus, to quote SS:
Chipset 1/1:
Front Side Bus Speed: 4x 133Mhz (532MHz data rate).
Maximum FSB Speed / Max Memory Speed: 4x 133MHz / 2x 166MHz.
Here are the things I've tried to fix this issue so far:
- Tried all available Nvidia driver sets going back to 67.03, which is the first driverset to fully support the Geforce 6 series of cards. Driver cleaner was used to ensure total removal of preexisting drivers.
- Tried all available sound card drivers.
- Tried disabling all unnecessary background tasks.
- Tried changing the hardware acceleration levels in the sounds and audio properties.
Unfortunately, none of that has resolved the problem (even though all of them were long shots). The problem is most likely a buffering issue as you describe, but it seems a bit irritating that it's struggling with something like this. Particularly when all other video formats play without issues.
Look if you can change something in MIDI-music.