Not so long ago, playing PoE with the '--nosound' switch helped with game crashes and performance issues and this got me thinking about the recent prevalence of crash reports (mostly Access violations) here and on reddit.
I noticed when using
Latency Monitor that PoE generates a quite significant amount of hard page faults, when sound is enabled.
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Process with highest pagefault count: pathofexile_x64.exe
Total number of hard pagefaults 35465
Hard pagefault count of hardest hit process: 29343
Highest hard pagefault resolution time (µs): 658072.134812
Total time spent in hard pagefaults (%): 1.797336
Number of processes hit: 10
With the '--nosound' command line parameter:
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Process with highest pagefault count: explorer.exe
Total number of hard pagefaults 6335
Hard pagefault count of hardest hit process: 4991
Highest hard pagefault resolution time (µs): 186770.914391
Total time spent in hard pagefaults (%): 0.436581
Number of processes hit: 6
This also happens to coincide with another reported many reported issuse 'FMOD MISSING EVENT' With my log files, with sound enabled, I see quite a number of:
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2017/03/30 13:49:30 ***** LOG FILE OPENING *****
2017/03/30 13:49:40 13822625 73 [INFO Client 2636] Uncompressed ShaderCacheD3D11.packed/1.dat in 0.495931 seconds
2017/03/30 13:49:41 13823046 73 [INFO Client 2636] Uncompressed ShaderCacheD3D11.packed/4.dat in 0.367446 seconds
2017/03/30 13:50:04 13846125 65 [WARN Client 2636] FMOD MISSING EVENT: event:/Sound Effects/UI/PVP/Countdown_01.ogg
2017/03/30 13:50:04 13846234 65 [WARN Client 2636] FMOD MISSING EVENT: event:/Sound Effects/UI/PVP/Countdown_02.ogg
2017/03/30 13:50:04 13846265 65 [WARN Client 2636] FMOD MISSING EVENT: event:/Sound Effects/UI/PVP/Countdown_03.ogg
2017/03/30 13:50:04 13846265 65 [WARN Client 2636] FMOD MISSING EVENT: event:/Sound Effects/UI/PVP/Countdown_04.ogg
2017/03/30 13:50:04 13846265 65 [WARN Client 2636] FMOD MISSING EVENT: event:/Sound Effects/UI/PVP/Countdown_05.ogg
2017/03/30 13:50:55 13897562 65 [WARN Client 2636] FMOD MISSING EVENT: event:/Sound Effect/MonsterSounds/FireElemental/Chunk_$(#).loop.oggSG
2017/03/30 13:51:30 13931859 65 [WARN Client 2636] FMOD MISSING EVENT: event:/Sound Effects/ItemSounds/flaskdrink.ogg2d
2017/03/30 14:38:21 16743218 65 [WARN Client 2636] FMOD MISSING EVENT: event:/Sound Effects/Environment/Fires/SmallBondfire.loop.oggSG
2017/03/30 14:41:59 16961234 65 [WARN Client 2636] FMOD MISSING EVENT: event:/Sound Effects/Environment/PitFire/Pit_Fire_$(#).loop.ambient.oggSG
Without sound:
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2017/03/30 14:51:39 ***** LOG FILE OPENING *****
2017/03/30 14:51:44 17545859 73 [INFO Client 3800] Uncompressed ShaderCacheD3D11.packed/2.dat in 0.171466 seconds
This, of course, may simply be coincidence...
Clearly, playing without sound would appear to be quite desirable, in terms of hard page fault reduction, but it's less than ideal.
On a subjective level, I'd also say that playing without sound results in 'smother' game, moreover I haven't had a 'Path of Exile has Stopped Working' (Access Violation) with multi-threading enabled, error, yet...
