ValveSoftware / ValveSoftware/Proton

DOOM 2016 sound is horribly broken (379720)

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Dominant language
C++
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Description

Throughout all Proton versions, sound in Doom is crackling and distorted a lot. It sometimes works when starting it with higher priority but only during the loading screen while the logos shows. When the menu screen starts, sound stutters, is distorted, or crackling horribly with many buffer drop outs.

I know this is a problem of Wine 3.7 which Proton is based on. Since then, Wine vanilla had some pulseaudio patches which finally fixed the problems here. A few other games are affected, too:

  1. Kingdoms of Amalur has this problem, too.
  2. Witcher 3 has this problem sometimes: It's either working from the start or shows sound issues from the start.

I think pulseaudio stability in wine heavily depends on system load during wine startup. This seems to have been fixed later.

The game itself has no performance issues: Playing with Vulkan, it constantly works at the vsync limit of 60 fps with GPU/CPU load way below 50% most of the time.

Sys info:
https://gist.github.com/kakra/cb95087ed58cb40ca7f9c0e5109aabce

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reproducing the distortion and dropouts in DOOM 2016, especially when the menu appears, and review the linked system information. Compare the Wine 3.7 PulseAudio behavior with the later vanilla Wine PulseAudio patches mentioned in the issue; done means stable, undistorted sound without buffer dropouts.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
cpp
Domain
audio-video-rtc
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
30/100

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