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...
Forum Discussion
Sound crackling started for me after switching from an old laptop (Windows 10) to a desktop build (Windows 11). I changed to Wide Dynamic sound (helped some), and reduced graphics to Medium except for Texture Quality and Post Processing (set to High), with strand hair and contact shadows still enabled (also helped some). In-game, I'm now only getting crackling and distortion during Varric's narration slides, and some crackling when there are a lot of effects, like in a conversation in Neve's office with wisps in the frame.
- EA ID (PSN ID/Gamertag): Avaraen
- Which platform are you on? Windows 11, EA App
- What type of audio device are you using? Onboard, Realtek
- If possible, share a Screenshot or Clip...
- If on PC, share a Save file for our team to look at: Unable to attach save files to forum posts, happy to email
- If on PC, please share a DxDiag file and an EA app Error ID Number
- See attached dxdiag files.
- Error ID Number: a5fdbaf8-85fe-4d2a-bf36-46fd77d2bf5f
I'm attaching two dxdiag files; one for the Windows 10 laptop that didn't have sound issues, and one for the Windows 11 desktop that does have sound crackling (files named accordingly).
Adding on here that there's something weird going on with resource usage between textures/graphics and sound. On the desktop build mentioned in my above post, I switched down to Medium textures and post-processing. CPU (80%), GPU (80%), and RAM (50%) usage basically stayed the same. The in-game VRAM usage shows at 6-7GB out of 16GB, regardless of texture quality. But despite usage staying the same, when I lowered texture quality, the overall game performance improved and the sound crackling went away, and there's just some mild video lag / stuttering during Varric's narrative slides. So it seems like the game isn't using available resources effectively to support higher settings on more powerful machines.
