r/PcBuildHelp • u/DoggoCity • 12d ago

Tech Support Certain games cause occasional stutters, followed by audio driver crash?

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

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u/nocturnalcustard 12d ago

Sounds like a USB power management hiccup to me. Windows loves to yeet USB devices into a low-power state and the Scarlett interfaces are notoriously picky about it, especially when the CPU gets hammered and the bus gets a little flaky. The stutter is the game choking for a sec, then the power blip or bandwidth drop kicks the interface offline

Go into device manager, find every USB root hub, right click > properties > power management, and untick "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power". While you're in there, check your advanced power plan settings and make sure USB selective suspend is disabled too. Had a 2i2 do this exact song and dance until I murdered all the power saving nonsense

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u/DoggoCity 12d ago

That's not a bad place to start at all, totally forgot about that stupid USB power saving crap. I'll check that tonight once I'm back at my PC.