Okay this is a long shot, but I was hoping if anyone with a Sound Blaster Z sound card found a solution to getting it working with Overwatch again after the Windows 10 1803 Update.
I’ve tried Uninstalling and Reinstalling the latest drive, but didn’t work.
If you can help me find a solution, I’d appreciate it so much. Thank you. I’m not sure if it’s just an Overwatch thing, a Windows 10 1803 version thing, or a Sound Blaster Z thing.
I might roll back the update to get it to work if I can’t solve this little problem.
I also had to uninstall and reinstall my drivers after recent Win10 updates, but in my case it was for an ASUS Strix sound card. I don’t think these problems are unique to your sound card.
Rich what 1803 did to my soundblaster Zxr (which is pretty much the same) was reset the driver completely somehow. I had to go back into my sound blaster control panel and switch it back to headphone mode & turns SBX effects and all that junk off again. Also u know the sound icon bottom right in windows tray? Click that and there’s new settings in 1803 such as dolby atos make sure they are all off.
If i was you however I would do what I did and that’s go back to 1709 build as theres also FPS stutters/drops on the 1803 in overwatch.
To do that you can simply “Recover” it takes like 5 mins max and you are back to a working pc until Microsoft iron out all the bugs.
You are awesome! Thank you so much for assisting me with this.
Oh that does not sound good at all. I’m for sure going to roll back now. Just a question though, how long does it normally take Microsoft to roll out fixes/updates? Also do you think Creative is working on a new driver for the 1803 to try and counter-act all these bugs?
Also, it’s cool to know that others enjoy the higher quality sound/audio. When you own a soundcard, you can never go back.
Well unfortunately Microsoft are terrible at fixing these issues. They will probably get the sound issues fixed in a week max.
However The FPS issues is another thing Entirely. They first introduced it in the Fall creators update & obviously alot of people didn’t know it was windows and they were blaming Nvidia/Amd etc.
Anyway after much digging people found it to be Windows yet no-one knows exactly what. (Possibly "game mode defaults to on even when you get rid of it in the Regedit) Anyway long story short they fixed it in the latest 1709 build 16299. However it seems the clowns there re introduced it with 1803 so yea… Just stick to 1709 for the forseeable future.
It’s very Frustrating this issue because i see so many “FPS drops” threads here & know that alot of them is due 100% to what Windows version they are on.
Oh also Creative are terrible at rolling out driver’s they are also hit and miss which one even work when you install them it’s like a lottery as you probably already know lol.
Best bet with Creative sound-blaster drivers is if you get one that works NEVER update it and pray you don’t ever need to reformat your pc.
Well I rolled it back today, and everything is working the way it should. I guess my last question is… when do I attempt to update windows again? In a month? Two months?
I’m just happy right now I have my good sound quality back. I played a few games without the sound blaster Z quality sound, and my god, I know now why I have it. It’s one of those things that once you experience, you realize you can’t go back.
Hey everyone, just joined to maybe help put you out of your Soundblaster/Windows update misery. I get problems every time MS release a big update, ususally everything resets and I lose the woofer and front speakers on my 5.1’s. I was just about to try downloading the latest drivers when I remembered what drivers worked last time. Luckily they were still in my downloads folder and they worked a treat. So I dug out a link for you I hope it helps.
![:slight_smile:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=5" ":slight_smile:")
I hope it helps.