Bioshock 1 Performance Issues
I always like to replay old games and see how they have aged. To my surprise some are still very good (like Half Life 2) and some… some no longer start. I was really amazed when I clicked the steam play button for Bioshock 1 and all I got was ,,Bioshock.exe has encountered a problem and needs to be closed”. Naturally google was my best friend and after an hour or so I finally figured it out: Bioshock 1 has sound issues on Windows 7 which prevents it from running.
So here is how to fix that:
1) I needed to establish that the issue comes from the sound, for that I needed to try and start Bioshock 1 without sound. In order to do that create a shortcut to Bioshock.exe, right click it and select properties. In the target field add: “-nosound” at the end (without the “ ”). If your game starts now, well then the problem is with the sound. Now that we know the problem, undo these changes (so they may not interfere with the next steps).
2) I had a Realtek integrated sound card and I needed to do the following: go to start->Control Panel->Sounds->Click recording Tab->Right Click under the list of shown devices->Click “Show Disabled Devices”. “Stereo Mixing” should now be on that list. Right click it and select “enable”.
3) Make sure you have no “Rapture3D” or “OpenAL” installed. These are some audio programs which don’t work well in this case. If you do then uninstall them.
4) Restart your PC.
Now Bioshock should start up. The audio sound isn’t perfect (you don’t here every single bullet form the machine gun but everything else sounds as it should). Once you are finally done with Bioshock don’t forget to disable “Stereo Mixing”. Also if you have a Creative dedicated audio card or are having other problems