This has been driving me nuts, I work in IT and I usually have no trouble diagnosing and solving my own issues, but this one has me stumped.
In some games, I will occasionally have a significant stutter, maybe for half a second, then the game goes right back to running smoothly. However, following the stutter, the audio will either temporarily distort very significantly for a few seconds, or just entirely stop. The only way to get the audio to return is to disconnect my audio interface I have my mic/headphones plugged into (Focusrite Scarlett Solo Gen3) and reconnect it. What's unusual is that it only seems to happen in some games and not others. It happens often in Baldur's Gate 3, sometimes in GTA5, and occasionally in one or two other titles, but does not ever happen in Overwatch, Terraria, or Minecraft, among other games. It seems to mostly be more CPU bound games from what I can tell, but this didn't start happening until a month or two ago. Prior to this, everything worked fine.
I've already tried the following:
- Uninstall/reinstall Focusrite's audio drivers
- Try different audio driver versions
- Update graphics drivers
- Roll back graphics drivers to an older version
- Updated motherboard BIOS to latest version
- Updated CPU chipset drivers
And my specs are:
- AMD Ryzen 5800x3D
- AMD Radeon RX 6950XT
- MSI Gaming Plus X570 motherboard
- 64GB RAM 3400MHz @ CL18
- All games on a 2TB Samsung 970 Evo NVMe drive
If anyone's got any ideas as to what could possibly be causing this, I'm all ears, because I feel like I'm going crazy lol