Hi there, I've recently had an extremely annoying issue regarding sound, games, multiplayer, and Windows 7. When I would start up a game (such as Counter-Strike Source or Heroes of Newerth) and connect to server, my fps and ping would be nominally OK, but the game would lag. In HoN this would be displayed by the heroes moving jerkily around the map, even though my fps and ping were good. In Counter Strike, this evidenced itself by glitchy nades that don't bounce smoothly, and whenever sounds are played, the ping spikes a bit. It's kind of like playing on a 33 tic server, for those of you familiar with the game. None of these issues occurred in single player games or in the aforementioned games with a local server. Symptoms included warping, skipping, and lagging while moving or viewing other players move.
My optimal solution was to
keep the MMCS service running, as if you turn it off your audio may start cackling/skipping in an annoying fashion. However, I disabled the network throttling component of this service. I believe it's a general audio problem specific to Windows 7 and multiplayer / online games. I don't think the audio card or the drivers make a difference, or at least they didn't in my case.
Leave the multimedia class scheduler service running, but disable its network throttling feature:
* Open regedit
* Go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile
* There will be an entry for network performance throttling, default value is 10; set it to FFFFFFFF hex (willl look like 0xFFFFFFFF to the right of the entry)
* Reboot
This removed the lag I was experiencing while still enabling me to have normal sound in-game. Specs in profile.
Games affected:
Source Engine Games (Team Fortress 2 (TF2), Left 4 Dead, Counter Strike Source (CS:S, CSS))
Heroes of Newerth (HoN)
Call of Duty Series (CoD), possibly including Modern Warfare
Overlord Series (Overlord, Overlord: Raising Hell, Overlord 2)
For those interested, here are some articles on the MMCSS:
How to use the throttling mechanism to control network performance in Windows Vista
Disabling/Tweaking Vista’s Multimedia Class Scheduler|The Bits 2.0