On Thu Jan 8 22:23:06 2026 +0000, Dzmitry Keremsha wrote:
It took a gargantuan amount of effort, but I believe my logic is looking pretty good right now. Programs are not overwhelmed with requests for audio, I did consider this scenario. Audio tests seem to pass (winmm:mci failed for the first time, not sure if it's related at all?) and audio is consistently good in games. Of course, I might be missing something. Unfortunately, I don't believe it is a matter of config, I am running Fedora KDE 43 with pipewire and RT audio permissions. It's nothing too far from the default, my CPU just seems to be quite jittery and that causes crackling. Honkai: Star Rail is the worst game in terms of crackling by far, but crackling happens in every single game with winepulse, and there is no crackling at all with winealsa. Honkai is forcing 44.1k sample rate, so it gives audio in 441 chunks and it's consumed in chunks of 471 (with 48k quant at 512). I don't quite understand why Honkai specifically acts like this, but the crackling happens every 20-30 seconds with 512 quant and it's actually better with 256. Maybe something with tlength to minreq scenario? with winepulse it varies between 2.5:1-3.5:1 depending on quant. If I am not mistaken, winealsa is always 4:1 if used with alsa pulse plugin (standard with Proton, as Steam runtime doesn't have pipewire libraries yet) The issue is definitely not exclusive to my setup, because I have seen mentions of crackling of similar nature when it came to Honkai. Although, setting quant to 256 might have helped that person (they reported it worked, but crackles can appear 20-30 minutes into the session). There is a mention of Balatro crackling on r/linux_gaming as well, and I believe it is definitely related to CPU jitter as well, because I can't think of any other explanation. In my case, every single game crackles under winepulse, even with quant set at 1024-2048. Games never crackle with winealsa on my setup. So far, with my patch even Honkai is perfect, though I can't quite get quant as low as with winealsa. I can go down to 220 at 48k with winealsa and 240 crackles with my patched winepulse (512 is fine). I don't like that I use an arbitrary number either, but I believe the root of the problem is insufficient safety margin and it needs to be addressed in some way. Perhaps the first steps are figure out what's special with the setup if *every* game is crackling with winepulse.drv, as that definitely doesn't happen universally.
Then, if there is specific problem with Honkai it would be interesting to debug what is special about it, starting from which audio paths it is using, which periods... maybe the problem is somewhere else. -- https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/9840#note_126571