PoP_OS 22.04.
Recently upgraded GPU and went from nVidia to AMD. Since AMD drivers are already baked into the kernel, I simply uninstalled nVidia ones by
sudo apt purge ~nnvidia
but after doing so and rebooting with the new GPU, the game I had been playing until minutes before the swap started giving me an unbearable amount of audio crackling, mainly (but not exclusively) when there’s audio besides the one from the game playing (e.g. background music player).
Searching online I found out it’s an issue with pipewire, and found someone mentioning a solution that edited the quantum values, though that didn’t work for me; specifically, making default.clock.quantum larger.
The second issue happens everywhere but fullscreen applications (e.g. games): if I quickly draw circles with my mouse, at some point the pointer starts drifting away in erratic ways, even though I’m still drawing circles with my mouse; other times, especially when there’s a windowed app (such as FreeTube while playing a video), even simply moving the mouse across the screen results in the pointer lagging behind as if the screen were jelly, and if I start drawing circles, the video stutters to the point of freezing.
Now, the audio issue is extremely problematic since I have to keep volume very low, as even an average volume means crackling is loud to the point it hurts my ears; the jelly-pointer is less of an issue, but still very annoying.
Any ideas?
Anyone who had these issues and is now on PoP 24 beta? Long shot, but it releases next week and if the issue was fixed for you, I’ll wait, otherwise I might just try a different distro.
Thanks in advance!
if you have an extra drive around, you could try a fresh installation on that drive, then do the things on that that cause crackle.
Good suggestion, unfortunately I don’t have an extra empty drive. For the time being I’m mitigiating the audio issue with the fix suggested by the top comment (higher min-quantum), hopefully PoP 24 ships with “better” defaults and fixes this out of the box!
Install to a USB as if it was a drive? For a test it might be enough.
default.clock.quantum
That probably didn’t do anything. I think it sets the quantum if it isn’t otherwise set.
Check pw-top while you’re playing from a source where you experience crackling. You can see the quantum value, if it’s low (usually 1) then that source is using the minimum quantum.
You can change it, temporarily (until reboot/pipewire service restart) with
pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.min-quantum <value>Try 256 to start with increase if you still get crackling.
Here’s the documentation on pipewire buffering: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ#pipewire-buffering-explained
I’ll leave finding the config file to make this permanent as an exercise for the reader.
Thanks for the reply and sorry it took me so long to get back to you.
Your solution works and 256 is enough to get rid of basically all cracklings, thank you!
There’s a config file somewhere to make it permanent, if you can’t find it just let me know and I’ll dig through my notes (if you find out, post it here for future googlers)
I get a lot of weird audio issues in linux too. I don’t remember having those issues in linux when I was younger, but I’m often getting weird audio artifacts when playing games on Mint.
I’m new to Linux (and very inexperienced, since PoP just worked out of the box until now), so I can’t relate haha though apparently the audio crackling is due to the CPU not being fast enough to do everything it’s required to, and when it starts lagging behind too much and can’t respect the min-quantum value anymore, the weird audio issue shows up.
setting min-quantum to a higher value (PoP ships with 32 min, I set it to 256) mitigates the issue a lot
Does your audio go through the graphics card like over HDMI, or a separate card?
No, my audio output comes directly from the motherboard
I have crackling issues sometimes too in games. It comes and goes.
On mint, 15 year old cpu and a rx 6700 card.
Like others said, make sure its not psu or mobo. Check your psu fan, for starters. They die often and the pc will run but act very weird and eventually shut down abruptly.
Im actually using 1 pc with a dead psu fan and I throttle the graphics card so it doesn’t crash, it works.
Change to pipewire if you didnt…
HW is in top shape, so no issues there. Pipewire is the deafult on PoP.
As the top comment suggested, the issue is in the min-quantum value being too low. Not a HW issue per se, it’s just that the CPU can’t keep up.
Thanks though!
You sure your PSU can handle this new card AND all your other components?
A good sign it can’t is if this only happens when your card is under a fair amount of utilization.
yes, PSU is enough: it’s a 550W unit (quality one) and GPU specsheet suggests 450W; draw is similar to the old card’s (178W vs. ~165W)
Try disabling the power saving settings for the machine, and make sure your power profile is set to ‘performance’. See if that changes anything.
I am certain this is a power issue, but where it’s stemming from us difficult to tell without actually seeing the machine.
Would also be useful if you check your BIOS for voltage settings for your CPU/MEM, and your PCIE lanes.
It’s not a laptop so I don’t have power saving options that would affect performance (I only see automatic suspend and screen inactivity).
I tried performance power mode, but that did nothing for crackling. The only thing that works is setting the min-quantum value like the top comment suggested. Thanks!
What graphics card is the new one?
9060XT
I think you may need to go onto the 24.04 beta to get the newer kernel and mesa… please check which kernel version you are running right now befote attempting such an upgrade
Kernel is 6.17.4, not the latest but not that outdated I think. I’m. not jumping onto the beta since the full release is just a few days away, in the meantime I’ll make do with the workaround for the audio issue. Thanks!
That’s quite recent… what about mesa?
A bit less recent, 25.1.5
Seconded. Update kernel. Fixes a lot of issues
There is an asterisk, as some distros ship the Hardware enablement kernels iirc, which was why I was asking for the specific kernel version
