I'm having a lot more fun with Arc Raiders than I expected to—not that I assumed there'd be anything wrong with it, I just really suck at PvP shooters. Arc's relatively peaceful game world (not counting all the damn robots) has thus come as a genuinely pleasant surprise, and instead of getting mad and going back to Find My Frogs after an hour or two, I'm thoroughly hooked.
I had just one problem: The sound in Arc Raiders would persistently hiccup and hitch, and the troubles would get worse the longer I played. After three or four matches, the audio would drop out for a full second or two, intermittently but repeatedly, multiple times per minute. The game continued to run normally, to be clear, it was just dead silent. The effect was incredibly distracting and irritating, and for a game as dependent on audio cues as Arc Raiders, it was a deal breaker: I was ready to quit playing if I couldn't find a fix.
Fortunately, I did find a fix. A search through the Steam forums revealed that I was far from alone in struggling with this issue, which made me feel slightly better about things—misery and company, and all that. The real relief, though, came from Steam user awsk, who shared a fix that's really quite simple:
- Right-click Arc Raiders in your Steam library
- Select "Properties"
- In the "Launch Options" field under the "General" tab, enter "-norhithread" without the quotes.
Like this:
And that's it! Fire up Arc Raiders and, hopefully, enjoy silky smooth audio from start to finish. I say "hopefully" because I can't give you an iron-clad guarantee this will solve your problem, but it worked like a charm for me and for a bunch of other people on Steam too. Awsk warned that using this launch option will "slightly decrease" the game's FPS, but I didn't notice any difference, and if there is some small reduction I'd say it's well worth being able to hear the game as it was intended.
As for the root cause of the issue, there's plenty of speculation—Discord, Bluetooth headsets, old-ass CPUs (that's me!)—but nothing definitive that I've seen. Whatever it is, hopefully Embark will cook up a proper fix for the problem soon, but in the meantime this should help—if you use the fix, let us know how it goes in the comments.
(On a completely separate note: Find My Frogs is brilliant. Give it a shot on Steam.)
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