Quote Originally Posted by OmniusOmnium View Post
As far as I understand it the GPU and the Motherboard "Sound Cards" are completely independent. The HDMI out runs on Nvidia drivers and can be used even when the onboard soundcard, which runs on realtek drivers, has been completely disabled. I think most modern GPUs have on board sound cards for HDMI and DVI outputs.

Edit: I just did a bit of research, the GPU doesn't actually do any sound processing as such because it just parses a digital audio stream to whatever external DAC you have it plugged into. In my case a TV screen, so it's actually the TVs internal sound card that is doing all the sound processing and conversion in that instance. But still has the issue so leads me to believe that this is a software issue not a hardware one.
in that case, i suppose the next step in troubleshooting, before moving on to the software aspect, would be to rule out the motherboard as a possibility, by installing a non-asus motherboard in a pc that's been having these issues, and seeing if that fixes the issue... that being said, either result isn't really optimal. If it does fix the issue, then while a fix would have been found, it's not exactly simple by any means, nor cheap... and I can't say many people would be willing to swap out a motherboard because of a single game suddenly having issues with it. On the other hand, if it doesn't fix the issue... then we're left with no leads on what else is causing it, and basically just have to hope that SE manages to fix whatever's triggering these issues in certain systems.