Just finished tuning up another system for MSFS and wanted to share a tip to fix intermittent audio cutouts and clicking, along with occasional micro stuttering (in case it helps anyone else).

Following in-depth testing of DPC latency, discovered that Win10 had defaulted the IDE SATA AHCI controller to the standard driver (circa 2006...) rather than installing the motherboard specific one. Reinstalled the intel RST driver from the motherboard manufacturer, and both performance and latency were significantly improved - no more audio clicks or stutters.  

Note that is for those running drives connected through SATA connections (and not M.2). Also note that it's important to install the driver released by the motherboard manufacturer rather than the generic Intel one.

Cheers

 

Thanks for this. I 've been figthing audio droputs for years but not solution. It only happens with PCM output, Dolby Atmos for example doesn't suffer.

Hope this helps. You can also test yourself using the freeware version of Latencymon and see if it flags any issues:

Resplendence Software - LatencyMon: suitability checker for real-time audio and other tasks

Other things to try are setting the windows power profile to "High Performance", and confirming SSD caching if you have them (Crucial momentum cache, Samsung rapid mode, etc).

 

54 minutes ago, Bandyka said:

Thanks for this. I 've been figthing audio droputs for years but not solution. It only happens with PCM output, Dolby Atmos for example doesn't suffer.

Edited December 14, 20205 yr by DylanM

I have been suffering this on and off since installing MSFS back in August.  It seems to happen when my 1080 card is really worked hard, so I thought it was a PCIe bus issue. 

Turning off all inputs to the audio card seemed to work for a bit, but now the clicks are back, and they do seem to coincide with a slight stutter.

I am desperate to get rid of them, as when the clicks / squelches start they are quite persistent.  Also, inexplicably and at random, sometimes they just don't seem to happen at all. 

So sincere thanks for the heads-up on this.  I will investigate this tonight.  👍 

2 hours ago, DylanM said:

Just finished tuning up another system for MSFS and wanted to share a tip to fix intermittent audio cutouts and clicking, along with occasional micro stuttering (in case it helps anyone else).

Following in-depth testing of DPC latency, discovered that Win10 had defaulted the IDE SATA AHCI controller to the standard driver (circa 2006...) rather than installing the motherboard specific one. Reinstalled the intel RST driver from the motherboard manufacturer, and both performance and latency were significantly improved - no more audio clicks or stutters.  

Note that is for those running drives connected through SATA connections (and not M.2). Also note that it's important to install the driver released by the motherboard manufacturer rather than the generic Intel one.

Cheers

 

An interesting solution; especially as I saw massive Frames loss when I switched out Rolling Cache to a separate SSD. Stutters, pauses and freeze. 

When switched back to same drive as MSFS - all good again. Odd - defies IT expertise.

 

I guess we're feeling our way on how to optimise this strange piece of software.

Thank you - on we go. . .

11 hours ago, DylanM said:

Hope this helps. You can also test yourself using the freeware version of Latencymon and see if it flags any issues:

Resplendence Software - LatencyMon: suitability checker for real-time audio and other tasks

Other things to try are setting the windows power profile to "High Performance", and confirming SSD caching if you have them (Crucial momentum cache, Samsung rapid mode, etc).

 

Thanks I'll give this a shot, I even installed a fresh copy of Windows on a seaprate SSD yet it still happens so It seems to be hardware related but despite being in IT all my life I can figure this one out. Very very odd.

I tried this but no joy. One thing that did work was turning off weather, traffic and multiplayer via data options. My assumption was that the sim was pulling data in, and that my cpu was unable to handle it, and that was causing a stutter. Until i upgrade my pc this is a possible workaround, if you can deal with the tradeoffs. 

I use m.2 drives. 3090, 9900ks water cooled. I do sometimes get hthe sound popping and crackling. I also use a dedicated sound card. 
Doesn’t happen with any other game or application. 

1 hour ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

I use m.2 drives. 3090, 9900ks water cooled. I do sometimes get hthe sound popping and crackling. I also use a dedicated sound card. 
Doesn’t happen with any other game or application. 

This is the same as me (without your snazzy 3090 of course 😁).  Samsung m.2 drives and a dedicated Sound Blaster card.  Water cooled 8086K.

I switched to the motherboard sound ports and it was just the same.  I had onboard audio disabled in the bios before I tried it, so it wasn't that.

The only thing I haven't tried is the "Nvidia high quality audio" from the graphics card (1080TI), but my monitor doesn't have any speakers so I cant do it that way.

Last night, turning it down to 70% scaling on 4k from 80% - very smooth and no audio clipping.  I can just about cope with the reduced quality.  I see a few jaggies occasionally but they are livable, and all of the gauges are still sharp enough to read.  Not the answer though really, so I will keep trying to solve it. 

Like you say, I don't get the crackling in any other program, but as you have said, there is nothing comparable to MSFS for stretching the system.

Using the graphing feature in the graphics card software, the clicking seems to coincide with 100% power draw peaks for the 1080TI on the graph.  I have it locked at 30 fps through RTSS, but it still draws 100% power sometimes due to scenery complexity etc.

Edited December 15, 20205 yr by bobcat999

On 12/15/2020 at 10:44 AM, Ianrivaldosmith said:

I use m.2 drives. 3090, 9900ks water cooled. I do sometimes get hthe sound popping and crackling. I also use a dedicated sound card. 
Doesn’t happen with any other game or application. 

Hi there, 5900x, 3080ti, m.2 drives, also dedicated sound card (here i wanna ask you, is it the same if you use a USB-headphone headset instead?`)

i also get the popping and crackling, and if i want to reproduce it, it mostly happens in areas where i have DEM mesh data from 3rd party.

Best example is this one: 

https://flightsim.to/file/14912/svalbard-25m-dem-high-resolution-terrain-elevation-data-from-srtm-arc-1

nothing much going on, but the file behind is weirdly huge,.. 

can you confirm my observations? :)

 

 

For those who run a dedicated sound card, what happens if you remove it (not disabling, but remove physically) and use onboard sound instead?
I used to run Soundblaster cards because back then motherboards didn't had onboard sound. But i also had these crackling sounds and never found a solution. Looking through the Soundblaster forums lots of people suffered from the same problem.
But then motherboards started to come with onboard sound but i still added a dedicated one. At a given point i was so annoyed by the ticks and cracks i removed the Soundblaster and switched to onboard... result... no more cracks and tics.
Card back in, same problem. Searched for days to find a solution (SB drivers, MB drivers, settings, you name it), no joy.
Removed the card and since then i'm only using onboard sound. And no cracks and tics...
 

3 hours ago, Lange_666 said:

For those who run a dedicated sound card, what happens if you remove it (not disabling, but remove physically) and use onboard sound instead?
I used to run Soundblaster cards because back then motherboards didn't had onboard sound. But i also had these crackling sounds and never found a solution. Looking through the Soundblaster forums lots of people suffered from the same problem.
But then motherboards started to come with onboard sound but i still added a dedicated one. At a given point i was so annoyed by the ticks and cracks i removed the Soundblaster and switched to onboard... result... no more cracks and tics.
Card back in, same problem. Searched for days to find a solution (SB drivers, MB drivers, settings, you name it), no joy.
Removed the card and since then i'm only using onboard sound. And no cracks and tics...

I use a Soundblaster card (Audigy) that suffered from this.  Unfortunately, it also happened when I plugged my speaker jacks into the onboard (motherboard) sound, after activating it and installing drivers, so that didn't cure it for me.  Was worth a try though!  

However, I don't have it now (using Soundblaster).  The cause I found was the GPU believe it or not!  When the GPU spiked at 100% utilisation, it caused the sound issue (squelches, clicks, pops etc.).  I noticed this as I set a graph to monitor GPU percentage, and the sound issues lined up with the 100% GPU spikes exactly.

I set a frame limiter to 30 FPS on my old 1080Ti, and it stopped it peaking at 100% utilisation (also kept the temps down ).  It ran between 70-90% after that - haven't had it since. 
Then the SU5 optimisations came out, which gave even more headroom to the GPU. 
Now, luckily, I managed to get hold of a 3080Ti, and it barely breaks into a sweat (about 55% utilisation).

So my analysis was when the GPU was constantly peaking at 100% (it only ever did this on MSFS), it caused some kind of spike or interference through the PCI bus, which of course that and the soundcard are connected to.  I don't rule out the fact that it could have been some kind of electromagnetic interfernce effect when the GPU spiked at 100%, but anyway, solved now.

A way to prove this would be to download something like Riva Tuner SS (that is what I did), and set it to limit frames in MSFS (or globally - system wide) to ensure you never spike at 100% GPU usage.  I set my graph in the Gigabyte app for my GPU card, similar to the Afterburner GPU app.

Edited November 30, 20214 yr by bobcat999