Audio Stuttering

Technical Support
1

I have been having constant audio stutter in the game and have been unable to remedy it. It does not appear to be tied to performance, but instead appearst to occur at intervals. Most of the time there is audio stutter (most noticable with music, voicelines, and environmental effects), but occassionally the audio will run smoothly. Thus, it strikes me that it is occuring at some interval, almost like a switch being thrown on and off. Has anyone experienced this? I have never had audio issues with other games before and this one is throwing me for a loop.

2

Hey, Welcome to the forumsā€¦

There were reports from Mar/April this year related to audio stuttering but no definative solution was foundā€¦ and the devs have not specifically provide any mention of this in subsequent patches/hotfixes.

Some people found that:

  1. it was performance related - i.e. lowering in-game settings substantially made the stuttering stop.

  2. it was caused by other sound problems on their systems - sound apps/drivers - even repeating static noise due to bad speakers.

  3. it was caused by doing other things at the same time as playing and their systems were struggling to keep up.

  4. it was resovled by updating the OS & GPU drivers and verifying the game files.

One person even found a kind of workaround:

Go into settings after you load your character, go to the Sound tab, and slide the Master Volume all the way to zero. Release the mouse. Slide it back up to wherever you want it, and exit the settings menu.

If none of the above solutions apply to yours, then please can you include your player.log, le_graphicsmanager.ini file and the output from a DXdiag report.

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Ok after some experimenting, it turns out it is tied to performance. Is there any way to make the audio independent from framerate? Any time the game dips below 40 fps (which is often) the audio crackles and skips.

4

Can you post your settings file: le_graphicsmanager.ini and the output from a dxdiag?

That will give me an idea of your system hardware & the settings you are using - I would then be able to recommend somethingā€¦

and no, there is no way to ā€œseparate the audio from the framerateā€ as you put it.

5

I experience this at times with my laptop if I try to play without it being connected to the charger, mainly due to it being a potato, if you are on a laptop that might help.

6

Thats likely because the laptop goes into battery saving mode when you dont use the charger and it down clocks the performance of your components to save powerā€¦ Thats fairly normal and is just how laptops are designedā€¦

You can usually override this by switching the laptop into performance mode under the power settings even without the charger plugged in - but obviously your battery life will be less - sometimes significantly less depending on how powerful / power hungry the components are.

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Itā€™s a potato, I guarantee you are correct because I know the battery settings, but itā€™s a 5 year old potato nonetheless that will be retired this year sometime soon :grin:

1 Like
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le_graphicsmanager.ini (491 Bytes)
DxDiag.zip (20.2 KB)

here are the files. I suppose the obvious solution here is to improve framerate, but even at lowest settings It wildly fluctuates for me. Gameplay itself is fine with the dips, but the audio stutters are very unpleasant.

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Thanks for providing this infoā€¦

Some background - I use a desktop i5-7500 (3.4ghz), 16gb, 1060 and NVME and I play the game at 1080p, everything on very low or disabled with 60fps framerate limited and I have virtually zero problems with the game barring known issues/bugs. My system is more than capable of running the game at 100fps+ OR at higher quality settings, but I have found that stability becomes a serious issue if I doā€¦

From the info you provided I would suggest the following:

  1. Make sure that Last Epoch is configured in Windows 10 (advanced display settings) or at a nvidia driver level to ONLY use the 1060 GPU. This shouldnt be neccessary but some people have experienced an improvement in general stability (game crashes less) when they do so. Especially when using a laptop that has dynamic performance features - i.e. it scales cpu/gpu clock speeds to provide performance/power saving or balanced modes.

  2. Make sure to only run the game at performance mode on your laptopā€¦ Dont try and run it on battery saving mode.

  3. Enable a framerate limit - this is very important to smooth out the framerate while playing the gameā€¦ The framerate limit prevents LE from going balls to the wall on your GPU (100% usage) which causes bigger fps spikes and other stability issues. I have found that if I set the fps to between 50-60fps, then I very seldom experience big spikes and things are stable. In contrast, if I set it to 100fps or leave it unlimited, then the spikes can be as high as 60fps of more at a time which is painful. I average close to 50fps in most situations except when it gets busy with lost of mobs / skill effects all over the screen, but even then fps drops to early 30s for a second at mostā€¦

  4. I dont have your player.log so I cannot see where you installed the game, but you might notice an improvement in general performance if its on your faster C drive than on the mechanical seagate barracudaā€¦ As the music is loaded and streamed it could be that the game is struggling performance wise and the first thing that fails is the audio portionā€¦ This suggestion is a guess based on my own experience moving the game to a fast NVME drive has improved quite a few thingsā€¦

  5. Your diagnostic section is reporting various problems with some games (including LE) but there is also an error with RzWizardService.exe - this is part of the Razer software for your Razer Abyssus V2ā€¦ There have been problems with older razer drivers/software and the unity game engine that LE usesā€¦ I would recommend that you check if there are any updates for the software to make sure that this is not causing other issues on your machine.

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Alright, thank you for the suggestions, this was a big help. By limiting the fps and configuring the driver preference, Iā€™m getting stable framerate. I did install this on the ssd drive and with optimized settings (pretty much anything I did for PoE i replicated), so that also helps. Razer Abyssus is just my mouse so i donā€™t think thatā€™s a big concern.

I really appreciate the time you took to help me out, it is very much appreciated!

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No problemā€¦

re the mouse softwareā€¦ Iā€™d still check it as that is quite an advanced mouse with high refresh & dpi so its possible that it could be forcing your PC to process the input at a higher rate than a less ā€œpowerfulā€ more normal mouse would and that may reduce performance / affect things like LE which could stuggle to process the additional input on top of everything elseā€¦

Hope you can enjoy the game more with the new settings ā€¦ and remember when the devs get to dedicating time to optimising things then we should all be able to enjoy a little more eyecandy and performanceā€¦

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