Audio pops and clicks on Linux only

Hello,

I’m using Retroarch 1.22 on Fedora with pipewire and vulkan, and an NVidia GTX 1660 GPU. On all cores, I have audio pops, especially after the game starts for a few seconds, and then occasionally during gameplay. It’s not a speed issue because when I fast-forward a game I get ~3000 fps.

On Windows 10 the same games / cores run fine without pops.

I’ve tried the following :

  • Increasing / decreasing audio_max_timing_skew
  • Increasing / decreasing audio_rate_control_delta
  • Changing the audio driver to pulseaudio
  • Changing the video driver to gl.
  • Increasing audio latency from 64 ms to 256 ms

The only way to prevent these pops was to disable V-Sync, but then the framerate visibly drops to ~15 fps and looks irregular. As I understand it, disabling V-Sync may introduce some occasional tearing, but it should not cause such a framerate drop. When disabling V-Sync on Windows, the framerate stays smooth. It seems I have some serious sync issues on Linux. Maybe a driver problem ? The driver is set to always run on the maximum power state (P0), so it shouldn’t be a power management problem.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Are you using wayland or X? If the former, can you try the latter?