At the beginning of the year I built myself a new PC as I was perviously running a old P4 system, however now during the ground missions the sounds stutter (on starbases seems fine from what I can tell so far), space and space combat is sounds are fine.
Does the FPS drop at all on the ground missions too?
They tend to use larger maps and so can hog a lot of memory.
I've also heard things that these onboard realtek audio chips and always up to scratch when handling a lot of sounds at once. Does the audio stutter out of combat (ie during quiet moments) as well?
Stuttering audio with integrated chipsets is usually a CPU related issue. Have you checked to make sure you don't have a high-cpu program running in the background while the game is running? I also found this after a quick forum search:
Please uninstall the current driver and install the latest provided by Realtek. You must uninstall the drivers before you install the new set.
1. Download the latest drivers located at http://www.realtek.com.tw/.
2. Go into the Control Panel and select Add/Remove Programs, or Programs and Features under Win7/Vista, and completely uninstall the current installed drivers.
3. Reboot the system.
4. Upon restart the user will get one or more messages from Windows asking for drivers. Cancel them and allow the system to completely finish loading.
5. Once the system has finished loading install the updated drivers and reboot when prompted.
If this does not fix your issue please try disabling the game's check for 64-Bit systems
Exit the game and bring up the Launcher, click Options, and in the "Advanced command line" box, paste this: -ignorex64check, accept the changes and try loading the game.
Comments
They tend to use larger maps and so can hog a lot of memory.
I've also heard things that these onboard realtek audio chips and always up to scratch when handling a lot of sounds at once. Does the audio stutter out of combat (ie during quiet moments) as well?
You might find other solutions here: http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=realtek+site%3Aforums%2Estartrekonline%2Ecom