Sound stutter in metro redux and others

[hiryu]

I've been encountering a lot of sound stutter in recent game releases to Linux. The affected titles for me have been:

Civilization: Beyond Earth
Empire Total War
Metro 2033 Redux
Metro Last Light Redux

I initially assumed it was some sort of sound driver issue with my Creative Fatal1ty, but I found I had the same issue on the family computer with Intel HD sound.

I finally found a fix (Note: I'm running Netrunner, which is basically another *buntu, so other distributions may not have these broken settings):
Edit /etc/pulse/daemon.conf

Change the following from:
default-fragments = 8
default-fragment-size-msec = 10

To:
default-fragments = 5
default-fragment-size-msec = 2

Restart pulse:
pulseaudio -k ; pulseaudio --start

I've read that other people were able fix the issue by forcing SDL to use alsa instead of pulse, but I was never able to to correctly force SDL to use alsa.

Just in case this is part of the fix, I'll mention prior to making the above changes, I had also made the following change to fix static-y sound in skype months back:
Edit /etc/pulse/default.pa and change:
load-module module-udev-detect
To:
load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0

This skype fix seems related to the Fatal1ty driver and probably isn't needed to fix sound issues in Linux games.

Anyway, I hope this information is able to help some people.

I'll try these changes on the family computer in a bit to make sure the fix also works with onboard Intel HD audio.

[hiryu]

Seems to work on the family computer now without the changes, weird. Maybe I didn't properly test it on the family computer before? Which would mean it could be an issue related to the Fatal1ty drivers.

I also found another issue. If Metro 2033 Redux is set to Very High for the graphical settings, you get very glitchly graphics. Setting it to high fixes it (I'm using nvidia drivers 346.22 and a GTX 980).