Crackling sound making it unplayable
Title screen, Varric doing his monologue and character creation all play sound with no problem but the second I got to the first cutscene with my rook and then into Mintrathous the sound is constantl...
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Heya, had this myself - I say 'had' but I've fixed the worst of it.
My system has the Nahimic software which lets you (amongst other things) use a bluetooth speaker (Echo Dot3 in my case) as a virtual rear speaker ... not as good as actual 5/7.1 but the effect does help a lot with atmosphere, you just have to get the volumes mixed nicely and there's a slider to calibrate the delay between the normal speakers playing and the rear ones playing ...
tl;dr? Turn that off, or at least set your sound output device in Windows to your headphone or speakers...
Also, disable that windows sonic virtual surround driver.
I wont say its perfect, I still feel the tiny lag spikes in the display, but I barely get the crackling, so I can tolerate it, for now!
Intel i7-12700H
RTX 3070Ti
16GB DDR5
8GB GDDR6 vram
Samsung 990 pro SSD, separate to the Windows SSD, for games only.
Hope this helps someone, but please don't think that you're excused Bioware! Should not be having a problem with audio crackling, and indeed have not had it since the last time I needed a separate Soundcard, and that was in the 1990s.
I don't use the Nahimic software and my spatial sound is already disabled and my output device is my headphones. I've even tried both jacks on my pc (front and back panel) and got no difference whatsoever either time.
I don't think it's a performance issue because the game runs with zero audio issues on my Steamdeck and my pc is substantially more powerful in terms of gpu/cpu than my Steamdeck is. Additionally, lowering all settings to the lowest possible settings makes no difference, and having the systems cranked to high also doesn't make any difference. The audio issues are just as bad on high or low.
I'm getting solid fps and the game is playable otherwise and looks fine and there's no input lag or anything like that that I've noticed. I would think if my game's performance was cratering and that was causing audio issues that I would also get poor fps/input lag, but it's not the case. It's just the audio.
I really hope Bioware's upcoming patch addresses this issue but I don't necessarily expect it as we haven't heard a peep from them about this otherwise.
