Terrible audio crackling when playing games, help!

[Light-Yagami]

When playing games, audio goes to shit basically. Crackles like crazy. Driver reinstalls and removal or the Realtek driver doesn't help. Also all the standard shit like enhancments, exclusive control and alike don't do anything. Audio is fine except for when I play games. Funny enough, when recording with OBS, I still get massive crackles as I'm playing, but the recording is crystal clean. I honestly do not understand what's wrong here. What am I doing wrong? Does it have sth to do with Nvidia GPUs? 

 

Please help - it's horrible. 

[Brianyu]

So, only in games, and only from the headset? It sounds like an issue with the grounding of the cable, and maybe only occurs when the mic is activated? Do other speakers do the same thing?

[Light-Yagami]

1 minute ago, Brianyu said:

So, only in games, and only from the headset? It sounds like an issue with the grounding of the cable, and maybe only occurs when the mic is activated? Do other speakers do the same thing?

Speaker do the same thing. Doesn't matter which USB port. And speakers are a 3.5mm jack, not USB. Headphones are on the other hand.

 

Mic is always active, it's a studio mic. And I just got it, the problem occurred many times before that. Witcher 3 is particularly bad. So bad you can't even distinguish what they're saying. Overwatch is better, but crackles still occur. That never happens when I'm doing anything else. Even if I'm compressing game footage with Handbrake and there's a lot of strain on the system, audio stays clean. I don't understand. 

 

You know what I've been thinking? That it has something to do with me playing on a secondary 144hz screen. I'm honestly just like.. why..

[Brianyu]

3 minutes ago, Light-Yagami said:

Speaker do the same thing. Doesn't matter which USB port. And speakers are a 3.5mm jack, not USB. Headphones are on the other hand.

 

Mic is always active, it's a studio mic. And I just got it, the problem occurred many times before that. Witcher 3 is particularly bad. So bad you can't even distinguish what they're saying. Overwatch is better, but crackles still occur. That never happens when I'm doing anything else. Even if I'm compressing game footage with Handbrake and there's a lot of strain on the system, audio stays clean. I don't understand. 

 

You know what I've been thinking? That it has something to do with me playing on a secondary 144hz screen. I'm honestly just like.. why..

I'm completely stuck. do you have on-board graphics you could try to see if its the gpu? Maybe its the monitor to be honest, I've had HDMI connections mess a lot of things up.

[Light-Yagami]

1 minute ago, Brianyu said:

I'm completely stuck. do you have on-board graphics you could try to see if its the gpu? Maybe its the monitor to be honest, I've had HDMI connections mess a lot of things up.

I've discovered what's wrong. My GPU has gone tits up (GTX 1070). It falls behind real time audio rendering for some reason when heavily utilised. I'll get rid of the driver and to a clean install. (might also have sth to do with a massive OC I run) I used LatencyMon to monitor my ISR and DPC routine execution time. takes about 4 times too long to complete. Maybe this knowledge can help you in the future. Now knowing that's wrong is so frustrating to me man.. If I know what's wrong, then I can look for a way to fix it. But looking for the cause of the problem is the single most frustrating thing in the existence. 

[Brianyu]

7 minutes ago, Light-Yagami said:

I've discovered what's wrong. My GPU has gone tits up (GTX 1070). It falls behind real time audio rendering for some reason when heavily utilised. I'll get rid of the driver and to a clean install. (might also have sth to do with a massive OC I run) I used LatencyMon to monitor my ISR and DPC routine execution time. takes about 4 times too long to complete. Maybe this knowledge can help you in the future. Now knowing that's wrong is so frustrating to me man.. If I know what's wrong, then I can look for a way to fix it. But looking for the cause of the problem is the single most frustrating thing in the existence. 

Great! Glad to hear that you found the issue.