Sound Crackling & Video Performance Fix (Mostly)

I have noticed that most of the performance issues experienced in game were due to resource sharing and conflicts between Audio and Video.  I use an NVidia GeForce RTX 3060Ti, but most of what I was experiencing is actually caused by the Audio.

Most of you probably have Realtek Audio Drivers.  And for most of you, if you have a PC that's 2 years or older, you probably haven't seen an audio driver update from Realtek.  Let's face it, they aren't exactly doing lots of driver updates and most of the drivers out there work fine. They are generic and compatible with nearly every motherboard out there.  However, the latest gaming engines are only tuned to more recent versions.  You need to have Realtek Driver 6.0.9509.1 or newer.  The driver date is 4/25/2023.  My PC, at two years old, had a driver from 2018.  I downloaded the latest version from my motherboard manufacturer.

Additionally, I also installed the audio driver from NVidia. They published a new one on 11/12/24 with the new graphics drivers. Normally I skip installing it. However, when you do, Microsoft installs their default version from 2017.  The funny thing is on your Device Manager, your system can show up to two audio driver/devices.  This is normal.  However, you want to make sure you are using something newer, at least 2023 onward.

Secondarily, if you are on an NVidia graphics card that's supported by the game, if you install the driver release on 11/12/24 566.14, it now forces OpenCL Compiler using a Clang + NVVM 7.0 based compiler as the default compiler, replacing the old compiler.  This means all those shaders are going to compile all over again. Strap in for another 20 minutes.

Now, did this fix every single instance of crackling? No, but it addressed 95% of it.  The developers of the game were coding against newer drivers and shader compilers.  My suggestion is to try these things to see if it fixes some of your performance issues.