Audio issues windows 10 KVM

Hi guys! first time poster here. I’ve dualbooted forever between Ubuntu and windows and decided a few weeks back to try my hand in VM instead. Found myself a video card, a usb switch, a usb pci card and a hdmi switch for secondary screen and followed a few tutorials on how to make my own VM using kvm. Mostly used bryan steiner tutorial on github . Great time saver. Many Thanks to the author

The machine is as followed
-Amd ryzen 3600 OC at a modest 4ghz stable

  • G.Skill trident Z neo 3600mhz 32gig
  • Asus Crosshair hero x570
  • 1tb NVME ssd
  • Vega 56 red dragon for the Host ( ubuntu 20.04)
  • Evga Geforce 1080ti for the guest ( windows latest version)
  • startech usb 3.0 card 2 ports ( as mentionned in the post of Furryjackman, Jack’ hardware : the ultimate vfio usb3 controler)

My complete Xml will be following at the bottom of the post. I’ved dealt with a lot of issues at first, lot of cpu stuttering, my fpses dropped for a second, half a second, dramaticly and then climbed up. i’ve followed the lasat turorial on how to do the cpu pinning, the Hugepages and solved the issue…

Now… i wouldnt post all that if there wasnt another problem, do I ?

I pass through a keyboard and mouse ( with a switch so i can go back to Ubuntu if it crash or i feel like it) and my Corsair usb headset through the usb card. i get a LOT of audio stuttering when i play games with discord. on division 2 and farcry its there but not too bad but as soon as i fire Escape from tarkov, it get really worse… the audio is more complex in Tarkov, lot of ambient sound and its crucial to the gameplay… Why would it do that??? Im stumped… I’ve read somewhere something about messages signaled interupt but honestly, i cant for the love of gods understand on how to properly set that up…

my complete Xml file:

win10 ec55c139-5030-42fb-8274-b647334045dc 16777216 16777216 10 2 hvm /usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_CODE.fd /var/lib/libvirt/qemu/nvram/win10_VARS.fd destroy restart destroy /usr/bin/qemu-system-x86_64

edit it seems the forum doesnt allow me to copy and paste my xml file… any way to share it?

Thank you for you time and knowledge, im just a padawan in the ways of linux, learning on the weekend when im home and not on the roads.

Hi, I had the same problem with my gtx1080 sound , i fixed that enabling MSI Interruption with a tool suggested by SpaceInvaderOne in the video " The best way to install and setup a windows 10 vm Part 2 Hardware Passthrough", the tool is in the video description. (i can’t add links in my reply, just search it on youtube)

Execute it as Admin, check all the entries relative to your headset, click apply.

Thats what i did, with some success. Sorry for the lack of updates, things have been hectic at home lol

Did the MSI interruption, problem pretty much disappeared on single player game and still is present when discord is running. The MSI alone wasn’t enough tho, i had to tweak my core count on the vm, passing from 5 to the vm and one to the emulator to 4 to the vm 1 emu and 1 host. Likes i said tho, things become less fluid with discord on. So I decided to throw more cores to the problem. Waiting on a 3900x now, since prices dropped a lot and i wanted one eventually. I guess that might help since playing alone is okay, just when i add the weight of discord plus the game, it might need an extra core or 2 to handle that without interruptions. Could have used a 3700x or 3800x but … there is no such thing as overkill. :slight_smile:

For thoses who want to know, still waiting on my 3900x. UPS even in canada is swamped and it was supposed to be delivered today buuuuuut, well it got delayed with no date… fun… i’ll keep you posted when it arrive

Solved!! the 3900x with 6 cores passed through OCed at 4.2ghz, 1 core for emulation et 5 cores for linux did the job! no more stuttering other than Tarkov loading little stutter which is cause by the game not the VM, it was like that on the dualboot system before :slight_smile:

Sorry to bother, but can you still share your xml file?

I would have to dig in my backup files i think i have it somewhere in .TXT form. I had to unmake my VM machine, I had a too good offer on the vega56 i had for the host, friend needed the GPU and was willing to pay more than what I paid for it sooooo… I’ll check that and get back

kvm ubuntu.txt (6.6 KB)

thats pretty much it, but i adjusted my core count to the 3900x and the order of the counts to the 3900x
like on this picture

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Thanks a lot!
By the way, have you done anything with the hypervisor so that L1/L2/L3 caches get displayed in the task manager? (i think it’s called cpu cache passthrough something).
I’m trying to make this vm as indistinguishable from real pc as possible.

I didn’t knew i could do that! I’m gonna look into it for my next one