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.

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 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!

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.

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. (=

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.

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?