Audio drivers and game crashes ?

Molten · November 29, 2011

Firstly the reason the title has a question mark is I am putting this forward as a question, but mostly I'm just telling of my experience today.

Every month or so I check for driver updates. Sound, GFX, etc. Like most people my game does crash now and then, but on the whole not often. I can play for 90 minutes with no issues.

This morning I updated my Audio drivers to Realtek version R2.66 . It was the only driver that needed updating and was overdue it seems as it was released on 21st of October. My OS is 64bit windows 7.

After this update my game began to crash whenever a helicopter turned up. Either by calling support, or just driving over a bridge and encountering a heli.

(I know a lot of people complain about crashing when heli's turn up but I had never had this happen before.)

So...bad instal I thought, so I resinstaled the driver, restarted pc etc. Same story, and always crash on arrival of Heli.

I then rolled back the driver and all was well again.

OK, by no means is this conclusive in any way. Just saying what happened today. Ive not heard of anyone else having issues with R2.66 but I do hear a lot about crashes when Heli's arrive.

Iv'e never had an issue before where it seemed my Audio drivers were causing issues but maybe it's something to keep in mind if anyone is having issues and has updated their driver recently.

The reason as I said the title has a question mark was I never realised Audio drivers could cause such problems. So even though the evidence in my case does seem solid I still leave it open.

TLDR: If you started to suddenly crash and normally don't, and have updated your realtek driver to R2.66 in the last month keep an open mind and concider a rollback.