W7 + Fraps + Some Games = Soundcard FREAKOUT

[dingozipper]

I've been using fraps for a good while now, and rarely has it ever been that much of a pain until recently.

I was hoping upgrading to version 3 would cure my ails, but I was wrong. It goes like this:

In some games, when I click record (with our without sound being recorded), my soundcard will start glitching like a madman. It'll crackle, pop, and sometimes just go berserk, sounding like an alien transmission before silencing itself.

This happens in WoW, L4D and others, but not all games. It also doesn't happen when using the desktop recorder.

Any help at all would be appreciated.

Specs (that matter to this):

X-Fi XtremeGamer (not the Fatal1ty - I threw that piece of shit out)
HD4850
Windows 7 x64

[frapsforum.com]

Are you running the latest creative drivers? And if you had a previous card, did you uninstall and delete the directory before reinstalling the new drivers?

[dingozipper]

Are you running the latest creative drivers? And if you had a previous card, did you uninstall and delete the directory before reinstalling the new drivers?

Did a complete clean install (IE reinstalled Windows) when I changed my card, and yeah - I got the latest.

I did some experimenting last night, and it seemed that when I uninstalled Alchemy, the problem wasn't as bad. There was still really bad crackling and such, but nowhere near as bad as before.

Is there something about Alchemy and Fraps I should know about?

[dingozipper]

I GOT IT!

So it goes like this...

The HD 4850 technically isn't fully supported anymore - driver support was cut off back in 9.6, and drivers after that weren't really designed with the HD 4850 in mind. This was EXTREMELY apparent with the 9.9 and 9.10 editions of Catalyst, as they did NOT work with the HD 4850 by any means: they caused games to crash, the control center itself was completely unstable, and was just generally buggy as Hell.

I had been using the 9.8 Catalyst drivers for this very reason, but was unaware that 9.8 wasn't even really a 4850 based suite... and was also the reason why FRAPS wasn't working as it should've. Uninstalling 9.8, using Driver Sweeper AND CCleaner, I popped on the x64 bit verison of 9.6 and... PERFECT! No issues, and sound records in ALL my games.

SO with that in mind, all HD 4850 users, please note if you're having issues, switch back to 9.6 - it's the last real set of drivers for that GPU anyways.