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)
Continuing to leave a comment roughly once a week until this issue is fixed. The lack of response or acknowledgement is getting unconscionable. It's been a month.
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.
Sadly in the same position as you. I have like 18 counted hours on Steam, all spent trying to fix this issue - none of my savefiles go past the prologue, not even encountering Solas...
Yes, still having audio issues, crackling sound
Feedback and fix, please? I don't care what's causing it – if every other game can cope with whatever above-minimum-requirements hardware combination you throw at it, then this one should, too.
I encountered this issue as well and immediately requested a refund.
After reading reviews on the forum, I noticed a pattern: most people experiencing problems are using Intel processors...
I have an external Focusrite audio interface, and having worked as a sound engineer in a studio for many years, I’ve tried everything...
I encountered a similar issue in another AAA project, Callisto Protocol. There, it occasionally popped up during cutscenes, but here it’s far worse.
With each passing year, I have more and more respect for Rockstar. They managed to create an amazingly polished game that, from my experience, ran flawlessly like clockwork.
Many major publishers could learn a lot from their competitors. In recent years, too many games have been released with technical problems, and buyers end up acting as testers. It’s disappointing that everything is done not for the players but to please shareholders.
I love he asks if its still a problem then doesn't reply at all after everyone saying its still an issue.
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.
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).
It is impossible to play, this needs to be fixed urgently.
I'm just going to keep asking every few days when I get to play the game I paid $60 for and now cannot return because of the hours I spent troubleshooting.
