When gaming with WIne or Steam Play/Proton, I have a lot of audio problems on my gaming desktop. Problems include popping and clicking, distortion, or audio getting stuck in a loop. I’ve tried reniceing pulseaudio to a slightly higher priority, but that didn’t seem to do any good. I’ve also tried a USB audio card instead of the Realtek onboard audio, but that didn’t help either.
Audio in native games seems fine. If I really have to, I can just boot into Windows to play, but eventually I’d like to ditch Windows entirely.
Are there any ALSA or pulseaudio settings I can tweak, like increasing buffer size, etc?
So after a few hours of tweaking and testing /etc/pulse/daemon.conf, Hellblade audio has no popping or clicking. However, Fallout 4 is only slightly improved. If I drop settings to Low-Medium, system load is low enough that audio can survive an intense firefight. It eventually cuts out, though, and looks ugly to boot.
Fedora 28 seemed to handle WINE audio better than 29. I’ll just have to hope future patches/update improve the audio situation.
Make sure to install winetricks xact and add a DLL override in winecfg for xaudio2_7. That solved a lot of audio problems for me.
This would rule out Wine as the source.
You could also try one of TKGlitch’s Lutris wine-tkg-nopulse builds that does not do the staging patches for Pulseaudio, cause those patches memory leak and distort after a few hours of use.