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submitted 3 months ago by mumei@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml

PoP_OS 22.04.

Recently upgraded GPU and went from nVidia to AMD. Since AMD drivers are already baked into the kernel, I simply uninstalled nVidia ones by

sudo apt purge ~nnvidia

but after doing so and rebooting with the new GPU, the game I had been playing until minutes before the swap started giving me an unbearable amount of audio crackling, mainly (but not exclusively) when there's audio besides the one from the game playing (e.g. background music player).

Searching online I found out it's an issue with pipewire, and found someone mentioning a solution that edited the quantum values, though that didn't work for me; specifically, making default.clock.quantum larger.

The second issue happens everywhere but fullscreen applications (e.g. games): if I quickly draw circles with my mouse, at some point the pointer starts drifting away in erratic ways, even though I'm still drawing circles with my mouse; other times, especially when there's a windowed app (such as FreeTube while playing a video), even simply moving the mouse across the screen results in the pointer lagging behind as if the screen were jelly, and if I start drawing circles, the video stutters to the point of freezing.

Now, the audio issue is extremely problematic since I have to keep volume very low, as even an average volume means crackling is loud to the point it hurts my ears; the jelly-pointer is less of an issue, but still very annoying.

Any ideas?

Anyone who had these issues and is now on PoP 24 beta? Long shot, but it releases next week and if the issue was fixed for you, I'll wait, otherwise I might just try a different distro.

Thanks in advance!

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[-] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 6 points 3 months ago

default.clock.quantum

That probably didn’t do anything. I think it sets the quantum if it isn’t otherwise set.

Check pw-top while you’re playing from a source where you experience crackling. You can see the quantum value, if it’s low (usually 1) then that source is using the minimum quantum.

You can change it, temporarily (until reboot/pipewire service restart) with

pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.min-quantum <value>

Try 256 to start with increase if you still get crackling.

Here’s the documentation on pipewire buffering: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ#pipewire-buffering-explained

I’ll leave finding the config file to make this permanent as an exercise for the reader.

[-] mumei@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Thanks for the reply and sorry it took me so long to get back to you.

Your solution works and 256 is enough to get rid of basically all cracklings, thank you!

[-] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

There's a config file somewhere to make it permanent, if you can't find it just let me know and I'll dig through my notes (if you find out, post it here for future googlers)

this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2025
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