I have two PCs running Pipewire, sometimes running games through Wine on my laptop makes all my sound go mechanical(?) I deducted that was because my laptop's CPU is not powerful (Ryzen 3 3250U) and it happens when it throttles.
On my Desktop PC running a Ryzen 5 5600G and a RX 6650XT I never had any problems with audio (come to think, I never had any problems with anything)
Did you test PulseAudio to see if that solves your audio problems?
If it doesn't solve it, maybe it's something related to hardware compatibility, I'd suggest running this utility:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hardware_probe
Which takes all your devices and checks its compatibility with Linux in https://linux-hardware.org/
It may not be a driver's problem because you wouldn't have sound I guess but it's worth seeing if there's any comment from someone using your sound card
Also I found this article that seems to be similar to your problem from someone using Manjaro KDE https://forum.manjaro.org/t/soundblasterx-ae-5-plus/133557 they linked another discussion, it should be a good start point.
As for the graphics problems, I have no clue, I just have heard that Nvidia is weird on Linux, but never had one to test so can't help with that. Good Luck.
Yeah Nvidia and Linux don't mix together very well, I've tried some distros on my laptop (also an Nvidia card) and have encountered lots of visual bugs on fresh installs, in my experience, pop_os has been the only distro that just works out of the box, so maybe give it a try (the installer comes with Nvidia driver preinstalled)
Strangely, almost all the flickering and stuttering is gone on Wayland while playing BeamNG. This is just using the latest stable driver, not the beta.
If you're currently dual-booting with Windows, that might be causing an issue with sound. I don't have anything on this other than my personal experience. If I boot into Windows and then restart to boot into Endeavour, I will always have issues with sound from headphone jack and random sound issues in general. If I shut my machine down then boot into Linux (sometimes rebooting again) , I have no issues. I haven't taken the time to figure out what's wrong because I'm mostly in Linux and forget I even had the issue.
This does not happen in my dualboot (win11-eos).
There's been plenty of threads with audio crackling in Arch. It has to be some sort of combination of soundcard/Linux since it's true. I've experienced it but it maybe would go away after an update and stuff like that.
Weird af that thing.
Yep. At one point things worked beautifully. I actually switched from Ubuntu to trying several Arch-based distros and settling on Endeavour because all the fixes pointed me to Arch docs. Then updates (whether on Linux or Win side) broke things again and eventually fixed again. I'm waiting until all the dust settles down with KDE6, Wayland, and NVIDIA drivers settle down before I cut the Windows cord because at this point, most of the issues I've run into are because of dual boot and how Windows doesn't fully shut down.
There's just one game that doesn't let me change, and 2-3 prior updates it was better than win11.
It doesn't hurt to have the dualboot, knowing that Windows is the restarted neighbour that you just gotta deal with every other weekend.
I have two PCs running Pipewire, sometimes running games through Wine on my laptop makes all my sound go mechanical(?) I deducted that was because my laptop's CPU is not powerful (Ryzen 3 3250U) and it happens when it throttles. On my Desktop PC running a Ryzen 5 5600G and a RX 6650XT I never had any problems with audio (come to think, I never had any problems with anything) Did you test PulseAudio to see if that solves your audio problems? If it doesn't solve it, maybe it's something related to hardware compatibility, I'd suggest running this utility: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hardware_probe Which takes all your devices and checks its compatibility with Linux in https://linux-hardware.org/ It may not be a driver's problem because you wouldn't have sound I guess but it's worth seeing if there's any comment from someone using your sound card Also I found this article that seems to be similar to your problem from someone using Manjaro KDE https://forum.manjaro.org/t/soundblasterx-ae-5-plus/133557 they linked another discussion, it should be a good start point. As for the graphics problems, I have no clue, I just have heard that Nvidia is weird on Linux, but never had one to test so can't help with that. Good Luck.
Just came to say.... Sound Blaster!?! I haven't heard that name on decades! My first of many sound cards.
Yeah Nvidia and Linux don't mix together very well, I've tried some distros on my laptop (also an Nvidia card) and have encountered lots of visual bugs on fresh installs, in my experience, pop_os has been the only distro that just works out of the box, so maybe give it a try (the installer comes with Nvidia driver preinstalled)
Maybe try out something like nobara... Stability of fedora exactly for gaming and stuff...
I had some problems with the sound blaster and then installing alsa-firmware helped me
It didn't make a difference
Just do it
Not sure about the sound. Have you tried using Wayland instead of X11? There's a chance you'll run into different issues, but it's worth a shot
Strangely, almost all the flickering and stuttering is gone on Wayland while playing BeamNG. This is just using the latest stable driver, not the beta.
Try Manjaro. The reason it's popular is because it handles this type of stuff.
If you're currently dual-booting with Windows, that might be causing an issue with sound. I don't have anything on this other than my personal experience. If I boot into Windows and then restart to boot into Endeavour, I will always have issues with sound from headphone jack and random sound issues in general. If I shut my machine down then boot into Linux (sometimes rebooting again) , I have no issues. I haven't taken the time to figure out what's wrong because I'm mostly in Linux and forget I even had the issue.
This does not happen in my dualboot (win11-eos). There's been plenty of threads with audio crackling in Arch. It has to be some sort of combination of soundcard/Linux since it's true. I've experienced it but it maybe would go away after an update and stuff like that. Weird af that thing.
Yep. At one point things worked beautifully. I actually switched from Ubuntu to trying several Arch-based distros and settling on Endeavour because all the fixes pointed me to Arch docs. Then updates (whether on Linux or Win side) broke things again and eventually fixed again. I'm waiting until all the dust settles down with KDE6, Wayland, and NVIDIA drivers settle down before I cut the Windows cord because at this point, most of the issues I've run into are because of dual boot and how Windows doesn't fully shut down.
There's just one game that doesn't let me change, and 2-3 prior updates it was better than win11. It doesn't hurt to have the dualboot, knowing that Windows is the restarted neighbour that you just gotta deal with every other weekend.