I run into a similar problem. I have a power-hungry GPU (3080) and CPU (9800X3D).

All my audio equipment was on the same UPS (and therefore outlet) as my gaming PC.

The result is that any time a particularly stressful game would be open, I'd get buzzing in the speakers. (Especially if the framerate was at 360) If you ask audiophiles online they will swear up and down that a cheater plug, balanced cables, or optical isolation will fix it - that will not fix it. It's not a ground problem. It's not coming from the connection from the PC to the DAC - it's a power issue.

It seemed almost inconceivable to them that the problem was EMI from the computer making it into the equipment.

I temporarily got a double-conversion UPS (converts AC to DC to AC again) and housed the audio equipment on that instead (separate from PC) Lo-and-behold the noise was completely gone.

However, those UPS are extremely expensive, and far worse they're very loud because the fans run constantly.

So, I went with a simpler alternative. Just get a power strip and plug all the audio equipment into that on a different outlet. That reduces it massively. You can also get some strips that are designed to reduce EMI, but I haven't felt the need as of yet.

I remember 15+ years ago reading about certain laptops (Dell?) that you could 'hear' scrolling on websites, somehow the video chip was interfering with the sound chips. I had one at the time it was pretty weird.

It's funny that apparently "high performance" DAC doesn't handle the common issue every single USB audio device have to worry about - noisy power. From the vendor page (on MODI 5, no idea which one author has).

> SPECS THAT MATTER

> Distortion: inaudible; 100-1000x lower than any transducer (speaker or headphone) you're using > Noise: inaudible; far below a typical headphone or speaker amp

> A picking texture is a very simple idea. As the name says, it’s used to handle picking in the game, when you click somewhere on the screen (e.g. to select an unit), I use this texture to know what you clicked on. Instead of colors, every object instance writes their EntityID to this texture. Then, when you click the mouse, you check what id is in the pixel under the mouse position.

Unrelated, but why? Querying a point in a basic quad tree takes microseconds, is there any benefit to overengineering a solved problem this way? What do you gain from this?

The source is electrical noise, but the solution of isolating the audio chain from the computer's USB means that in the future you might not notice when you've introduced another GPU memory bandwidth hog into your rendering loop.

Good story, though.

I've been using optical connections for audio on my gaming PCs for decades now, exactly for this reason. Though wireless headphones will work just as well these days. Too many game developers mess this up (e.g. by having no frame limiter in the game menu) and many of them never fix these kinds of issues. Thanks for caring and fixing this in your game!

Schiit Modi 2 is notorious to struggle with cleaning up USB power

Example https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/b...

Reading through your post, it's likely the noise sourced from the network cable is coupling into your headset cable. Check how close those cables are to each other If you're using a USB port at the back for your DAC, try switching it to the front. The noise can also come from the power supply which couples into the motherboard's ground plane and shows up on all USB ports.

25 years ago my 3.5mm jack headphones would buzz whenever I moved the mouse... Bzzzzzzzzz,tk, tk, tk ,tk, bzzzzzzz, tk, tk, tk, tk, tk....

Not at all surprised to see that it's a Schiit DAC causing this problem

I have a similar issue with Genshin on PS5 when using the headphone jack in the controller with IEMs (didn't happen with a headset). It starts buzzing in my left ear when I open the game menu or open the map. On the map it only buzzes when I move the cursor, interestingly enough. I later noticed that the PSU coil whine coincided with the same events. Still no idea why it's like that

Thankfully doesn't happen with an external DAC.

I had this problem on my Oculus Rift box (remember those? it still runs beat saber just fine) and the solution was to solder some beefy capacitors on the end of unused power cables coming out of the power supply. If I recall correctly it was the 12V line that did it, which I didn't expect.

The buzz isn't completely gone but now I can't hear it unless I'm paying attention to it, which if I am playing beat saber, I'm not.

I have a Modi DAC I've used for years with several different gaming and development rigs and I've never had a problem like this. Sounds like a failing component, maybe a capacitor or regulator—the article author should contact Schiit.

These effects used to be much worse in the nineties, often even if you had a fancy sound card. Electrical noise is significantly reduced now.

anyone else get big audio buzz relief using the extra, three prong cable on their normally two prong apple laptop charger? it felt as good as having my wisdom teeth out after i switched

Moving my cursor makes an audible sound over my (builtin) audio card. I always blamed inductors somewhere (noisy power). This has never not been the case with any desktop with built-in audio I have owned over the past 25+ years

Not sure if it's related-- but anyone else get a buzz or pop in their headphone/spear when loading certain web pages?

I've been curious if this is some form of browser fingerprinting or just crappy speakers.

Since switching to the $10ish Apple USB-C to headphone adapter vs. just plugging in my 3.5mm headset into the computer, the buzzing when gaming completely stopped for me. Cheap solution.

I have this weird thing whenever I have headphones and open the Dota2 settings on my Mac, then I not only get buzzing but the overall sound quality plummets!

There's a certain cinematic quality to this story... perhaps so much so that if it were to be included in an actual movie it would be seen as "too over the top" (i.e. CSI-like)

I hit a similar issue on my MacBook Pro. Whenever I watched YouTube or streamed Spotify while playing a game, the audio broke into little "clipping chirps" and static.

For me the culprit was Game Mode. I still don't really know what it does, but disabling it fixed everything. None of my games come close to stressing the CPU, yet Game Mode was throttling anything that wasn't the game. It was also on by default, which felt like a design miss.

For MacOS, a better approach would be to check what's happening on the second monitor or at least avoid throttling apps that aren't being displayed. Assuming the game deserves all system resources and that the user doesn't want to watch or listen to anything else is a bad bet.

Anyway, the good news is the fix on a Mac is simple once you know where to look. (=

I have an usb "audio card" for other reasons (since my hackintoshing days).

It works fine in some ports, it has a lot of background noise in others.

Your game looks super interesting! Very looking forward to playing :D

I was going to say get a DAC, but they already had one in their setup.

Great write-up. This is basically spam but I want to specifically thank the author for pointing out their solution, because it's directly applicable to one of my own projects and I'm going to do it tonight!

> There’s no need to download the whole texture each frame, just the part of the picking texture that’s under the mouse. So I implemented that and it worked and buzzing is gone. As a bonus, now it’s also not visible at all on the GPU trace.

I am a bit confused. Based on the earlier paragraphs, it hinted that the solution would be related to the frequency of the job, not necessarily its load (since other games do not have this issue), but then the fix was not changing the frequency but the load of the job.

What am I missing?

That's a common problem. It's electrical noise in your signal. The only way I know how to completely eliminate it is using external DA/AD converters and connecting them to the PC using optical wires. We used MADI cards back in the studio back in the day.

Which is why I consistently have told people to ensure that they pick a DAC which is powered independently if they intend to connect it via USB. Schitt Audio makes great stuff (it's what I have sitting on my desk right now) which is designed in that way, but there's no magic formula to beat physics when you physically power an audio device over a connection that is vulnerable to induced noise.

If you're trying to eliminate noise in your audio setup, the first and most important thing is having audio converted from digital to analog outside of the computer chassis itself (e.g. instead of a soundcard get a DAC). The second thing is to disconnect the power flows between the two systems (e.g. get a DAC which is separately powered). The third thing is to connect the DAC via a non-electrical connection so that the signal path is not vulnerable to noise in the environment between the two systems (e.g. use Toslink/optical and not USB/copper). The fourth thing is to condition the power input to DAC to remove transients (use an audio power conditioned, which does not need to be some grandiose thing, it's a bunch of capacitors).

Beyond that, there's not much you can do, after all there's EMI/RFI all of the time in the environment. If the DAC chassis is metallic and properly grounded, it should reject most, and the same should be true for the computer chassis, but there is always going to be /some/ incidental noise. As long as the noise floor is low enough that it's well below even quiet listening with amplification, you'll never hear it. But the default state of audio on most computer systems is pretty shit and people don't realize it, because they are mostly listening to Bluetooth earbuds (which at least provide no physical path for induced noise).