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Audio crackling due to nvlddmkm.sys Nvidia driver latency issue
Hello people,
while playing Arma 3 I noticed strange crackling/popping noises in the menu and in-game when there were a lot of background sounds. I found a video of someone else on YouTube who had the same issue:
Arma 3- Crackling and Popping Audio - YouTube
The crackling was also brought to my attention during video playback on YouTube at some occasions. Sometimes videos froze or turned black. I did not think much of it when I first noticed it. A few days ago, I remember having a "nvlddmkm.sys stopped working and recovered" warning when the pc came back from sleep mode that I now recognize as another symptom of the issue. I also experienced multiple BSODs caused by nvlddmkm.sys a month or so ago that I suspected to be caused by faulty drivers. However, no BSOD or "stopped working warning" has happened to me ever since.
When I googled the sound crackles today, I read that there might be a connection to a latency issue with my drivers. I installed LatencyMon (Dpc Latency checker doesn't work with Windows 10). I let it run in the background while I continued playing Arma 3 and it confirmed my suspicion. According to Latency Mon, the Nvidia Windows Kernel Mode driver, my old friend Nvlddmkm.sys, is causing the "buffer underruns". I attached screenshots of the LatencyMon results to this post. When I found out that the problem lay with my graphics driver, I did a complete clean install of Windows 10. I turned off automatic driver updates and reinstalled all drivers manually from scratch. But the issue persisted. I even plugged in a different pair of speakers to see if my subwoofers were failing but still no avail. The new speakers had even worse sound disruptions (strange low tone background noise eve though there was no sound input). I also updated my BIOS.
I am getting the idea that this is in fact a problem with my GPU, a factory overclocked GTX 980ti. I hope there are a few experts who can give their opinion on this.
Thank you very much for taking your time to help me with this!