ValveSoftware
Audio Crackling in more demanding games after lastest update
I am noticing persistent audio Crackling sounds on more demanding games. Specifically elden ring and monster hunter world. It has only been happening after the latest steamos update and people have said reverting back to the old steamos fixes it. There has been no fix yet.
I saw a post that a user tuned off the Steam Recording and crackling was gone. Try it.
THis could mean the problem is with the Recording.
I saw a post that a user tuned off the Steam Recording and crackling was gone. Try it.
THis could mean the problem is with the Recording.
I don't have game recording on unfortunately and have tried everything including various proton GE. Im just gunna hope that steams next update will fix and address this.
I want to go out of my way to add 2 things:
1: I am having this issue on the Legion Go S as well, with crackling / stuttering, which seems to be performance bound (i.e. more intense of a game, worse the stuttering.
2: To really make it clear to Steam, this is an problem seen in multiple issues, specifically #1943 & #1953 .
In my opinion, this is an issue that needs to be investigated as soon as possible as it is quite literally game-breaking. I feel as if I cannot play anything. The command "fix" is merely a stop-gap that mitigates, not resolves the issue.
Fundamentally, something in the latest version of SteamOS has caused a drop in audio quality (even with headphones in, it is not a hardware issue) when the system is under heavy load.
UPDATE: I can confirm that this issue is fixed by restarting your Steam Deck / Legion Go S.
This bug is able to be reproduced by having your handheld enter sleep mode, and then having it wake up.
By fully powering down and turning back on again (or restart) the issue is resolved!
I had the same issue until I switched to the main OS channel per https://www.reddit.com/r/ROGAlly/comments/1l2awks/psa_if_you_are_installing_steamos_on_the_rog_ally/ and installed the latest update as of today.
I had the same issue until I switched to the
mainOS channel per https://www.reddit.com/r/ROGAlly/comments/1l2awks/psa_if_you_are_installing_steamos_on_the_rog_ally/ and installed the latest update as of today.
Please be careful with this because, as mentioned in my previous post, this issue seems to be related to the handheld entering sleep mode...
An update "fixing it" can actually just be because to update you need to do a hard restart.
I would suggest letting your handheld enter sleep mode and then bringing it out of sleep mode to see if the bug still persists.
I would suggest letting your handheld enter sleep mode and then bringing it out of sleep mode to see if the bug still persists.
I played several games and put the device to sleep several times. So far so good. But of course I can't be 100% sure it's fixed. Will post back if the issue persists.
I have the same issue on my Steam Deck OLED. What fixed it for me was lowering the Microphone to completely low/off. (I noticed the problem before with my headset, sound was crackling when I used the steam deck microphone, when I switched to the microphone from the headset the crackling was gone)
A restart did not fix the problem for me. I fresh rebooted my deck and immediately booted a game, game was crackling. Only the microphone setting fixed my issue.
I am having this issue on my Rog Ally when docked with HDMI. Basically it starts crackling after gaming for like 10 minutes, and then the audio comes back but with a 1s delay, which makes it unbearable to play docked. The workaround to restart the Ally while docked and not using suspend works, but it is quite annoying to not be able to use the suspend feature.
P.S. I faced similar issues with Bazzite, which is why I jumped to SteamOS, just to find the same issue. Windows didn't have this issue, but it was a terrible experience when docked otherwise lol.
I'm having the same issue and the workaround @1basti1 provided also works for me.
I will try the mic thing. But I have found a complete but temporary fix. Once I reverted back to the old steamos before 3.7.8 all audio problems disappeared. But it will automatically update back into 3.7.8 if you go into desktop mode or restart steam deck.
Yeah, I honestly don't want to revert back, but the mic fix is acceptable until Valve fixes this issue.
Yeah, I honestly don't want to revert back, but the mic fix is acceptable until Valve fixes this issue.
Unfortunately I just checked and the mic thing did nothing for monster hunter world.
Also can I ask why you don't want to revert back? I don't think it causes any problems.
UPDATE: I can confirm that this issue is fixed by restarting your Steam Deck / Legion Go S.
This bug is able to be reproduced by having your handheld enter sleep mode, and then having it wake up.
By fully powering down and turning back on again (or restart) the issue is resolved!
I have restarted many times and did a full power cycle and nothing changed. I am well aware you can get this sound on some games after sleep mode this is not what I'm talking about.
I mean starting monster hunter world and no matter what I get the same stuttering chopping sound in the background. And going back to the previous steamos fixes it but when I go to 3.7.8 again, the exact same noise problem starts again. Most of my games don't have this problem. Just those 2 I mentioned.
Is valve at least aware? I mean, I have my turn mic off workaround. But this is really bad actually. Unplayable even without turning the mic off.
I can hear games start crackling in realtime, when I put the mic volume up in the quick access menu.
Is valve at least aware? I mean, I have my turn mic off workaround. But this is really bad actually. Unplayable even without turning the mic off.
I can hear games start crackling in realtime, when I put the mic volume up in the quick access menu.
I would assume they are aware because I asked steam support to forward these issues I had to the correct department. And I know a few other people online did the same.
I was also experiencing a large amount of audio crackling when playing Last of Us Part 1 with default settings, SteamOS 3.7.8. Turning on FSR Frame Gen made it worse. It was driving me crazy because I watched vidoes on youtube and nobody else was having this issue with this title with default settings. And other titles (Overwatch 2) work fine.
Turning off mic volume also resolved the issue for me. Glad there is an easy workaround.
After seeing the various discussions here, it seems there are multiple causes of this audio crackling. It would be nice to know this issue is being looked into officially, as it disappointingly has not been mentioned in the latest reviews of SteamOS by major platforms (such as Bellular News). This issue needs to be publicly acknowledged and resolved.
There are many fixes for the crackling sound. No need to do them all. Try one by one:
- turn off Steam Recording
- turn off/mute mic
- in the performance tab, turn off overlay
- try the Decky Plugin "Pause Games", helps with the resume crackling sound (in the store) https://github.com/popsUlfr/SDH-PauseGames
- turn off WiFi Power Management (settings/developer)
Per game fix:
- turn off in game properties, general Overlay (I would also use in the performance tab, turn off overlay)
- try another Proton (Experimental or GE_Proton)
- add this launch command, you can tweak the value between 0 and 100: PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=30 %command%
Hope one of these can help you
I have noticed this occasionally when playing games while streaming with OBS from the Deck. Specifically Crab Champions and Tetris Effect: Connected. I noticed the issue much more obviously and frequently with Tetris, and it seemed worse when the BGM had vocals in it. When playing Tetris without streaming and at higher graphics settings, the audio was always fine, but after bringing OBS into the mix I had to lower my graphics settings to stay at 60fps, and I noticed the audio suddenly would crackle sometimes. Since it was only when streaming, I figure it's related to higher CPU usage or something. I do play with the FPS counter on usually. I tried turning off the WiFi power thing and the performance overlay, but I still get crackling on the main menu for Tetris. I tried the launch command at the recommended 30 MSEC value and that didn't work either, or at least it didn't completely solve it, it's possible that it improved it slightly. I'm not leaving a game open, sleeping, and resuming mid-game, but I do put my Deck to sleep when I finish playing a game instead of turning it all the way off. Not sure if that could still cause issues. Next time I stream, maybe I'll fully restart the Deck and see if I notice a difference. I have Game Recording set to Record Manually and it says "Background Recording is now turned Off". Unsure if that's meaningfully different from having it all the way off, but I can try changing that as well. I checked htop over ssh while the game and OBS were running and none of the CPU cores were maxed, looked like it was around 60-70%. I lowered the internal mic volume all the way while in-game and I still hear some crackles. I have OBS using a USB soundcard with a separate mic plugged into it. I don't know if this is the same issue as you guys are having here or something else. It's a bit hard to test this since the problem isn't 100% constant.
edit: The issue has actually mostly or entirely gone away for me, so maybe some of the changes didn't take effect right away. My music has sounded normal in Tetris Effect: Connected the last several sessions that I remember. I did both the game-specific launch options fix and a few of the global ones. I keep the FPS counter on and it doesn't seem to be a problem.
Just read today one more tip, restart pipwire. Try this command when it happens. Maybe make bash script and add it to steam and run it when needed. If it works of course:
systemctl --user restart pipewire pipewire-pulse wireplumber
Replying to https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamOS/issues/1974#issuecomment-3146655155
I tested this in the main Steam menu and I notice all the UI sounds are gone after restarting those... I then launched a game and it had sound fine, but the Steam UI sounds are still gone. Switching to Desktop Mode and back to Game Mode fixes the sound, so maybe Steam needs to be restarted if its configured audio source disappears. I had also tried changing the default output device back and forth in the audio settings to fix the UI sounds, but no luck from that.
I personally like the UI sounds so I'm not sure this is worth doing currently.
Replying to https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamOS/issues/1974#issuecomment-3148687804
That's strange. To turn on UI sounds, go to settings, Audio, check the Enable UI sounds box.
Replying to https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamOS/issues/1974#issuecomment-3148725919
Yes, I know... It was on. I'm saying restarting pipewire bugs out the UI sounds. Toggling that on and off didn't do anything either, I had to restart Steam.
Almost 3 months and it still crackles when I turn my microphone on. Can this please be addressed?