On Thu Apr 30 21:46:15 2026 +0000, Paul Gofman wrote:
There is no winning here otherwise - either some games are slower and don't crackle, or they aren't slow and crackle. There are other options. First of all, yes, I guess the current timer management itself with relative delays is not accurate and it is solved with https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/8628 which is however stuck for some reason. Then, the audio surely doesn't crackle for every PA setup and every game. The first thing here is to understand what is going wrong with the specific setup and game. Then, worst case, if there is indeed a systematic problem and it can't be solved by avoiding incompatible PA setups the solution is maybe introducing a separate PA update loop with its own buffer, so that PA audio pushes are decoupled from mmdevapi timeline. But before going for this complication I believe the actual exact problem must be understood. I actually compared your PR to old winepulse and indeed it seemingly was starting to crackle a lot faster with the old one. The problem is that pointers still overlap maybe half an hour in even with your patch. The problem is widespread (from my experience on forums and such), but unfortunately I only have one PC at my disposal. If i can provide some additional logs for this I'd be happy to, but I need to know what exactly besides the ones proving pointers overlap.
FWIW I tried two distros, two soundcards and different kernels. CachyOS kernel helps with underflows but it's a different issue altogether. -- https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/10792#note_138465