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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I'm adding to my post below of things I've discovered about the crackling sound issue. I take it back that I'm running Windows 11. I'm on Windows 10 Pro. I'm running an Intel Core i5-8600K CPU @ 3.60GHz. My husband's machine, which runs the game perfectly fine, though with lower graphics since I have a better video card, is an AMD Ryzen 7. It's a much newer processor with more cores and threads. His is also not able to be upgraded to Windows 11, so it's still a pretty old processor. So, I have a new processor and motherboard on order. Yeah! I've been wanting one for a while.
I did learn something very interesting last night. I went and updated my chipset drivers, the Realtek chipset drivers from the motherboard manufacturer, and my BIOS (which was woefully out of date). And...the problem is nowhere near as bad! The game was nigh on unplayable anywhere but the lighthouse and the crossroads. Now, there is a little stutter, but nothing that I can't live with. Still have the new processor and board on order: new case too, (back connected - yeah!). But, I think the problem boils down to the processor and chipset. All 3 of the DXDiags that people have put down in the comments have been old processors: 2 i5s and a Ryzen 3. Check your processors to see if you're one of the ones that are on the list, but still a little old. I am wary of saying to flash your BIOS and update your chipset drivers, because that can be some advanced technical stuff, but it worked for me.
I'm also on an i5-8600 processor. I updated my BIOS and Realtek chipset drivers and that didn't improve my issue at all sadly. Video card = Gtx 1060.
With my overlay up in Minrathous and DLSS frame gen on I still get 50 fps or so on medium settings and the game looks/runs fine. It's just the audio that is messing up.
I actually get no audio distortion (or very very little) in the Crossroads, but in Treviso/Arlathan Forest/Minrathous it's unbearable.
So there's obviously some sort of performance issue going on here, but I'm still pulling a fine FPS and the game looks/runs without any video stutter. It's purely audio being affected. And even putting every setting on low doesn't fix it.
Also the Steamdeck runs this without any audio issues whatsoever and I'm fairly confident that the Steamdeck is less powerful than my pc. But Steamdeck gets such a low fps and graphics settings that it's kinda unbearable to play on that lol.
Moneys a little tight for me right now so I don't particularly want to shell out $1k for a new pc, especially when my pc runs other modern games (like BG3) without issue. So I hope Bioware finds some way to fix this.
I'm no computer scientist doctor, but I don't think it's about how powerful the processor may be but rather how old it is. Older tech will process things differently. There could be a technical bottleneck somewhere that older processors are struggling with regardless of how many GHz they have. So far what I've seen from people who have reported their hardware, the issue seems to be on processors that are 12th gen Intel or older. Steam Deck also uses an AMD processor, and I don't think I've seen anyone report the issue with AMD yet. This is just my opinion.
Yeah I do suspect that it's an issue with intel processors as based on what I've seen of other people's dxdiag files it seems like a lot have intel processors. Hopefully Bioware can find some way to fix this.
