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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Exactly the same issue as everyone else. The only thing that even remotely helped was rolling back my NVidia driver but it seems like this might be a CPU issue. After rolling back the driver the crackling is there, but mostly when the load on the CPU is obviously high. When I tried streaming the game to a friend, it got much, much worse, and improve greatly when I stopped - I tested this a few times.
Considering what I paid for the game and the total lack of acknowledgement of this issue in the patch notes or the note on updates prior to the patch, I expect an update this week or I'll be petitioning Steam for a refund and advising others not to buy the game in this state. Irritatingly, your note says to share a save file and DXdiag, which can't be attached here, and I had to upload both to drive.
interregnumrexI have noticed on my end when running my Geforce overlay that CPU usage is close to 100% in Minrathous and obviously the crackling is at its worst when in cities or really densely populated areas. I haven't seen it much at all when I'm in areas with less things going on.
But what I don't get is if this truly is a performance issue then why is it that cranking settings to low does not fix it? Also, I haven't noticed any fps or video lag in Minrathous or other cities and I maintain a respectable fps even if I boost settings to high. There's basically nothing to suggest poor performance by my pc except for the audio distortion.
Finally, I do have a Steamdeck and I tried it on there. The game runs without any audio issues whatsoever even though my Steamdeck has a weaker cpu/gpu than my PC. And cranking all settings on my PC to the same ones I run on my Steamdeck = audio issues still on PC.
So I don't get it. If the audio distortion is an issue with lower end pcs for VG than I would think that the Steamdeck would also be unplayable, but it's not. And my pc is still a fair bit stronger than the min recommended settings. For example min recommended VC = gtx 970 and I've got a 1070.
I dunno. Submitted my dxdiag and a clip of the distortion in another thread on this issue. I hope Bioware fixes it because it's a bummer to only be able to play it on the Deck where I get low fps and ugly graphics.
Entirely agree - I experimented with exactly the same, kicking the settings to low, and it did nothing. I think the fact that streaming through discord made it demonstrably worse on my machine is interesting, however.
Presumably these less populated areas don't push the CPU to 100% either. This sounds like suboptimal use of CPU resources.
