I recently had some annoying sound issues with my install of the awesome Codemasters F1 2010 game on my PC. I’d recently reinstalled the whole PC due to a hard disk failure (thank God for the backups!) and noticed that from this point on, quite a few games were struggling where sound output was concerned. F1 2010 was by far the worst offender. Samples occasionally wouldn’t play out and the sound was very poppy and crackly at times, especially when there were lots of simultaneous car engines around.

The box I play on is a modded Acer Aspire M3201
Windows 7 Home Premium 32Bit
3GB RAM
ATI AMD Radeon HD 4850 512MB
Realtek High Definition onboard sound

Turns out I wasn’t the only one with sound issues as the game is evidently quite fussy with some hardware and driver combinations. I also discovered that the bog standard Windows7-supplied Realtek HD drivers are not exactly much cop.

Further to that, when it comes to installing the official Realtek drivers there are TWO parts to install. Realtek make it look like the second part is not essential to have but it’s fixed all my sound problems with all my previously struggling games. (L4D2, F1 2010, Grid to name the main culprits.)

Both driver installs are available from Realtek’s official site under “High Definition Audio Codecs” but as their download sites were so so slow I’ve uploaded them here too for people to yoink if they don’t fancy waiting an hour for their drivers to download.

First part:
Official Realtek High Definition Audio Codec R2.61
for Windows Vista & Windows 7 – 32/64bit
Download: Modula.org.uk | Realtek Official

Second part: 3D SoundBack Beta 0.1
Download: Modula.org.uk | Realtek Official

NOTE:
Use at your own risk. Don’t blame me if it messes things up for whatever reason. By downloading his means you’ve read and accepted any blurb that Realtek may have wanted to give you on their website before you download this stuff!