I am running Pulseaudio (ALSA and OSS do not support my Xonar DG) and it works fine for me.
While less noticeable with the newer versions of pulseaudio, it was not designed for realtime or competitive latencies in the first place. The best recommendation for you is to continue using alsa directly as this is not a bug with steam or the games.
Tele42: Then using pulseaudio by default in Steam seems like a bad choice to me.
I am aware that I may as well stick with ALSA, but what I'm trying to get at here is that the default configuration right after installation shouldn't be broken.
UPDATE: after a full system update, I am unable to reproduce this issue. PulseAudio seems to work ok now.
Closing.
SDL_AUDIODRIVERx1 2013-02SDL_AUDIODRIVER=alsax1 2013-02SDL_AUDIODRIVER=alsa,x1 2013-02
This is not necessarily valve/steam's fault, but it still needs to be adressed.
When playing HL1 or CS1.6 (only games I've tried, probably affects more if not all games), I have an audio delay of about 500ms which is extremely obvious when firing any weapons, or even browsing in the game menus.
When I set SDL_AUDIODRIVER=alsa, the audio behaves like in windows, with no delay at all.
I am running ubuntu 12.04 64bit on a regular realtek audio device with no special configuration at all, so I think almost everyone should be able to reproduce this. Perhaps many people don't really notice, but playing CS competitively would be impossible with this delay.
System specs:
Intel c2q q9400s
Zotac GF9300-G-E
2x2gb ddr2-667
80gb intel x25-m g2
default ubuntu 12.04 64bit install with nvidia driver 310.14
I assume that this happens because PulseAudio sucks. As usual.
Those of you who have PulseAudio (all ubuntu installs) in your systems, please confirm by starting steam with:
SDL_AUDIODRIVER=alsa
steam
and compare with the default behavior, or:
unset SDL_AUDIODRIVER
steam
Try firing a gun or something.
BR,
/Anton