There's a bug in Arc Raiders that's causing the sound to drop out for some players—here's how to fix it

Arc Raiders A First Foothold: The mechanic Apollo on his back with his hands raised working on a machine.

(Image credit: Embark)

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:

Arc Raiders properties screen on Steam showing the -norhithread audio glitch fix — (Image credit: Steam)

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.)

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.

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