Hi, folks. A bit of an unusual problem here. In some Proton games, in semi-predictable places, I’ll get this audio crunch noise. It’s not deafeningly loud or anything, but it is distracting sometimes. I first heard it when playing Starfield, and it was most common when loading into a city environment. This crunchy audio sounds kind of like when Hollywood simulates corrupt or glitchy video recordings, and it’s in addition to, not really in place of, the other audio in the scene, as far as I can tell. Because Starfield is a sci-fi game, I initially thought it was either supposed to be there or that it was there for everyone on Windows as some kind of Bethesda technical shenanigans. Then I noticed it in Horizon: Zero Dawn, a game I had played through 7 years ago on PS4, so I was familiar with the sounds in that game. It was much more rare there, and I had a hard time pinning down a pattern. As I’m now playing through Pillars of Eternity II, it’s much more noticeable, as it tends to happen whenever you continue the dialogue to the next step by hitting “1. Continue” or whatever other dialogue options the game gives you, but how frequently it shows it can vary wildly by location. Sometimes I won’t hear it for hours, and sometimes it’s every time I click to continue the conversation.

I wish I could show you what this audio sounds like. I encountered an area in Neketaka where this glitch happens frequently, so I set up OBS and recorded it, only to find that the audio glitch didn’t make it into the recording. “Maybe it’s my speakers?” I thought, but I also get this glitch through headphone jack with a shielded audio cable. I tried the game on Steam Deck, which also defaults to running the game through Proton instead of native, and the same scene via cloud save was glitchless. I found some search results saying that some “audio niceness” value may have been exceeded, but when I turned on logging, I didn’t see any evidence that that’s what’s happening to me as the thread explained that I should, and trying the advice they offered anyway, I saw no difference. I’ve tried Proton 7, 8, and experimental, and they all behave the same; Steam Deck says Valve selected Proton 8, for what that’s worth, and my kernel is newer than the one Steam Deck uses, though that is Valve’s custom kernel. I’m on Kubuntu 23.10 and kernel 6.5.0-26-generic.

There are a couple of reasons why I chose to run Pillars of Eternity II, in particular, via Proton that I won’t bore you with, and I may be able to get around this more-pervasive-than-average problem for this game specifically by running it natively, but I’d still like to solve this problem for all of my future Proton games if possible, and I can fairly reliably reproduce the issue here to be sure that it’s gone after making changes. Does anyone know where I can start looking? Has anyone run into this problem personally?