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 constantly crackling and cutting out.
Have tried every possible audio setting in game and updated drivers.
(On windows 10)
This issue is still not fixed for me either, come on Bioware...Running on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060. This is getting ridiculous.
Download the patch as well, hoping it would help. It didn’t. Same issues as before and my graphics actually took a hit; they’re worse than before, less optimized.
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my chipset drivers, the Realtek chipset drivers from the motherboard manufacturer, and my BIOS (which was woefully out of date).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 have the exact issue. When I move around with my character, sometimes the sound evens out, but mostly it crackles and distorts. The only fix I found was putting the Vsync to 1/4, but that keeps giving me headaches.
the last update hasn't changed a thing for me and the game is still unplayable with the horrible crackling sound and slowed like hell speech. It happend right from the start of the game ...damned unbelievable...
Hello! I tried eveything, audio setting, drivers update and roll back, game configs, every app and config that other players recommend, and nothing worked, even after the last update :(
I played for several hours, returning the settings to high quality and still have no problems with the sound. As I said above, I turned off the system sounds in the mixer and set the vsync setting in the game to 1.2. Try it, maybe it will help someone.
Same problem here... The worst was in city with many NPCs.
I tried everything and the only efficient thing for me was vsync 1/4, which means 15 FPS on my config. So I really hope the team is working on this problem, it makes the game unplayable.
Has anyone tried to set Windows > Settings > Power & Sleep > Additional Power Settings > High Performance? I've just followed the advice given to someone experiencing the same issue to ours on Reddit
Sadly didn't work. From reading through that thread it seems like it could be a CPU bottleneck issue. I'm personally running on an i5-9600 which is a few generations old. Curious what other people having the audio issue are running on.
I have an i5-8600 and a gtx 1060. That said, I have run the game on my Steamdeck with zero audio issues whatsoever. I don't think the deck's cpu/gpu are any more powerful than what I'm running on my pc, and my pc gets better fps and in game performance than the deck by far. I also have more ram than the deck.
Also pretty sure some people are running newer cpu/gpu than I am and still having this issue.
I suspect this is an issue with nvidia cards or realtek audio as it seems like more than a few people who have reported it are running that hardware. but I could be wrong
I turned off the system sounds through the volume mixer in Windows and set vsync 1.2 in the game. I haven't heard any crackles in the sound for some time , maybe it will help someone too.
