Sudden random crackling audio and stuttering slowdown in all cores

RetroArch Windows devices
#1

Hi! Just started using Retroarch a few weeks ago and it’s working pretty well, but I’m having one very frustrating problem. At random intervals when playing games, regardless of the core, the audio will crackle and suddenly everything in the game will move at about 1/3rd speed. The problem goes away if I just savestate and restart Retroarch, so it obviously isn’t framedrop due to too much onscreen action or anything. I have a medium-level gaming rig, and game run at a perfect 60fps 99% of the time; it’s just these random incidents that are driving me crazy. Like I said, sometimes they happen at random after over an hour of perfect gameplay, and sometimes it just happens as soon as I load up a ROM, before the BIOS is even done displaying.

I’ve looked all over the forums, and have found a few people complaining in threads that are related to CRT filters; I am using a CRT filter from here, but I would really like to keep using my shader if at all possible; I’ll test whether disabling it even solves the problem, but if this issue sounds familiar to anyone, I’d really appreciate some help.

Thanks!

#4

Nope, the problem is still occurring, despite the newest nightly :frowning:

#5

I’m not getting any audio-crackling/slowdown, unless my Frame Delay is too high. However, the 5/9/2016 Nightly .exe’s are crashing my 1.3.4 RetroArch unless I delete the .cfg.

Did something change that requires a wipe of the .cfg?

#7

EDIT: I narrowed it down to a tweaked CRT-Royale shader. It doesn’t want to start if that was selected the previous session.

#8

I’m kinda confused what you guys are talking about, since it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the issue the thread is about… I already reset my config when I switched to the latest nightly, so it’s definitely not config-related. I’d really appreciate some help :x

#9

Could be a thermal/power throttlling issue. Make sure your power profile is set to “performance” and you may want to go into your BIOS and and turn off any throttling, just to see if that matters.

#10

I’m already in high power mode and configured my BIOS. I built my own computer, and I’m sure it’s not a throttling issue; my temps are fine and I don’t get this issue with any other taxing games.

#11

The issue that can occur with throttling is that emulators only use the CPU for a few milliseconds per frame and then spends the rest of the time idling, and this can trick your operating system into thinking it’s appropriate to clock the CPU down to low-power mode. This is more of an issue for higher-performance machines, since it finishes the emulation task that much faster.

#13

Ah… I guess that’s why “sometimes” when I alt+tab, and then when I return to RetroArch it’s slow and requires another alt+tab or F1 twice to get to the menu and back again to return to full speed? I thought it was my Frame Delay setting, since it only does this now since I started using that (I think).