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 found the culprit and the solution to the problem, at least in my case.
I apologize for my English, it is not my native language, I hope I can explain myself in the best way.
I will tell you how this was resolved.
I have a Windows 10 system, on my PC I have two hard drives, a one terabyte HDD on which I have my work programs and some games installed, and a 240 GB SSD for the more "demanding" games.
When I bought this new Dragon Age I installed it on my SSD, and from the beginning I experienced the sound problem that is raised in this post, but sporadically, it was not until I arrived in the port city that the thing became unplayable.
I stopped playing at that point and began looking for solutions without success. But just then, I had a problem with a program I work with and I found myself in the need to format my PC. Once I installed everything and proceeded to download the game again from STEAM, I accidentally installed it on the HDD instead of the SSD, I realized it until I started it and got a message about it. I was too lazy to download everything again, so I proceeded to play to see if the performance suffered much. To my surprise, the performance was practically the same as on the SSD, it just took a little longer to load, but the best thing of all was that the sound problem disappeared completely. I have played for about 20 more hours, I have also visited the city of crows and I have not had any problems, so yes, the cause of the unpleasant sounds is having the game on an SSD.
My drive is a WDS240G2G0A, I know it is a low-end drive, but no other game had given me this problem before.
So, if you have the option to install the game on an HDD, you can try if what I have mentioned here works for you too.
Greetings and happy new year to all.
It sounds insane, but I can confirm that on my gaming PC (7800X3D, 32GB RAM, RTX 4070 Ti Super, Win 11 Pro, 4TB SSD), running on an HDD (an old WD3003FZEX) did significantly improve the sound issues (there are other problems caused by the slow load times though), compared to running on an SSD (Kingston SFYRD).
On my gaming laptop with much lower spec hardware (i7, 16GB RAM, RTX 2070, Win 10 Home), I used an external SSD (Crucial X9 Pro) and never had any sound issues. So it isn't only using an SSD that causes the sound problem, but a combination of SSD plus higher end configuration.
As a starting point, on my gaming PC, with the game installed on an SSD and set to Ultra graphics settings, I observe these issues:
- The loading intro video lags, and the sound crackles and skips.
- Varric's initial narrative slide introducing the bar scene has severe video lag and sound crackling.
- Minor sound crackling and popping for ambient dialogue Minrathous.
To test on the same gaming PC, I copied the game to my HDD and then ran the EA App installer to verify the files and launch the game. On the HDD, with Ultra graphics settings:
- The loading intro video played without any video lag or crackling.
- Varric's initial narrative slide introducing the bar scene played with no video lag and with only minor crackling on a couple of words.
- There was no crackling for ambient dialogue in Minrathous.
- However! The load times are atrocious, and texture and model loading in-game is very slow (e.g., sprinting through Minrathous means that NPCs don't load before I've run past them, and if I stand still in a busy location, then I can observe the NPCs popping into place).
As mentioned in my other post on this thread, the sound issues are virtually eliminated outside of Varric's narrative slides when the game is installed on my SSD and when I select High graphics options and then turn textures and terrain quality down to Medium. I also have less video lag in Varric's narrative slides with those custom graphics settings.
ETA: just for giggles, since I didn't have issues using the Crucial X9 SSD external drive on my laptop, I swapped over to test the same drive on my gaming PC. Same sound and video issues on the intro video as with the Kingston SSD. So the brand of the drive and the connection type (USB-C versus PCIe) aren't a culprit.
ETA2: tested the game on a friend's PC, they have a virtually identical system to mine, same mobo, except: slightly lower AMD processor, slightly less beefy GPU, and smaller SSD. (7600X, 32GB RAM, RTX 4070 Super, Win 11 Home, 2TB SSD) No issues whatsoever. It runs better on Ultra than mine runs on mostly Medium settings. It's a lil frustrating to feel like I'm playing on a potato quality machine when it should be able to run Ultra easily.
EA_Illiumyou were previously active on this thread, can you please make sure that the team is aware of how the type of drive seems to affect this issue for higher end PCs? Also, would you be willing to update this thread and let us know whether the team is working on this and expects to be able to fix it? This is a long-running issue that hasn't had any update for quite some time. Thank you!
I can't believe it, it worked. I uninstalled and moved it to my HDD. Then went to Dock Town. Audio was smooth. The SSD it was previously on is a Samsung 860 EVO 1TB bought in 2023.
Load times are so much longer though, really not fun. Gonna wait for this to be fixed but I hope this is enough for the devs to make a breakthrough on the fix.
