Game's audio causes craclking when using recent pipewire. Easily reproducible on Helldivers 2 (553850), but also happens on Returnal (1649240)

[braiam]

This issue is independent of Proton version, since pipewire since version 0.3.67 has implemented tighter latency timings. There are multiple reports of Wine/Proton apps having issues (1, 2, 3). I've found that on a default installation, Helldivers 2 seems to reliably produce these results without having to do any other steps.

Using a workaround that changes pipewire-pulse timings to the previous default mitigates this issue, but doesn't totally resolves it:

pulse.properties = {
    pulse.min.req          = 256/48000
    pulse.min.frag         = 256/48000
    pulse.min.quantum      = 256/48000
}

While we can claim that the issue is pipewire, native apps/games don't seem to have issues with these configurations. I'm not sure what component or at what level of the chain it should be coordinated, but when pipewire 0.3.67 starts hitting stable channels among distributions, these issues would become more prevalent and commonplace.