Perhaps a more accurate way of putting it would be "You Had It, And Then Gave It To Me."
It was the sound.
Oh sure, I've done lots of other things that gave me incremental performance gains. The 30.82 Detonators seem to like Battlefield just fine, for example. Setting my pagefile to two gigs didn't hurt nothing, neither. But it was the sound.
It's funny, too, because people gave me exactly conflicting advice sometimes. I don't think this is because they are naturally silly people, I think it is because there's just something fundamentally not right with the way sound is handled or interpreted by the driver. Some people said to activate Hardware Accelerated sound in the second panel of the audio configuration, some said to deactivate it. Obviously, being a gamer of sound mind I had already activated this, because acceleration has always been very good to me in the past. Gaze ye upon 3D acceleration, for example. Good stuff right there. In this case, for me at least, it's not. It wasn't enough to just take the hardware acceleration check out of the box in the game. I had to execute Dxdiag from the run prompt, go to the sound panel, and turn acceleration completely off. Please don't rush out and do it. I have no idea how it affects other games, or your computer, or whatever. You should, as people have suggested to me, experiment deeply with the sound options in game - trying different combinations of audio and sample quality until you magically stumble upon the right one. I'm just telling you what worked for me. And boy, does it ever. It's like seeing the game all over again.
(CW)TB
