Hello,

I’m currently playing RoboCop Rogue City and I’m having issues with the audio. As I play, the audio stops every 5-10 seconds for about a second or two. This really breaks the experience and is also a problem during dialogues.

Here are my specs:

  • I’m using Kubuntu 24.04
  • AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core Processor 2.2GHz
  • 32GB RAM
  • NVidia GeForce RTX 3070 8GB
  • Motherboard: ASUS TUF GAMING X570-PLUS (Wi-Fi)

Note: I’m using the onboard audio, but the audio is going through HDMI to my monitor to which my speakers are connected.

This isn’t the only game in which this happened, but I can’t remember which games that was. It’s usually in more graphic intensive games.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    Might check the kernel log to see if the kernel is emitting error messages that look relevant.

    $ journalctl -krb

    (will be in reverse order)

    Or

    $ sudo dmesg

    EDIT: Might also check to see whether it still occurs if you plug headphones into your motherboard’s headphones output and switch to using that as your output with pavucontrol or similar.

  • Contramuffin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    Kubuntu 25.04 here. Did you edit the audio quantum setting? If not, you should. It may or may not be the same issue, but I would get occasional buzzing when playing games. It turns out the default audio buffer time is really small, so when you’re doing something CPU intensive (such as playing games), the CPU can’t consistently fill out the buffer on time, leading to occasional audio hiccups. Increasing the audio buffer time will slightly (ie, imperceptibly) increase audio delay and will give the CPU more time to fill out the audio buffer, which solved the audio issue for me. Try putting this line:

    context.properties = {default.clock.min-quantum} = 1024

    into /etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/pipewire.conf

    (you may have to create some folders and files).

    Then restart and see if that fixes anything

    • cyborganism@piefed.caOPEnglish
      1·
      1 day ago

      Y’know, I have another problem altogether with audio in Linux in general. Whenever audio starts, there’s a fraction of a second where it doesn’t play anything at the beginning and the audio just “wakes up” and starts to play. This drives me insane when editing sound and music. Also, you won’t hear simple notification sounds because of this. This is permanent on all Linux devices I have and it appears to be a widespread. People have complained about it for a while now and have been trying to figure out workarounds because it seems the devs don’t give a crap about that.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      I don’t think that a buffer underrun is going to cause a second or two of silence; the cut-outs are going to be way, way shorter than that. Will sound like crackling to a human, maybe.