Compatibility Report

• Name of the game with compatibility issues: A Way Out (same underlying symptom also observed in Squad — see notes) (yes this issue is mostly AI generated because I think that the AI can explain it much better)
• Steam AppID of the game: 1222700 (A Way Out) / 393380 (Squad)

System Information

• GPU: AMD Radeon RX 7650TX
• Video driver version: Mesa 26.2.2 (RADV)
• Kernel version: 7.1.10-zen1
• Distro: NixOS 26.11 (Zokor)
• Link to full system information report as Gist:
• Proton version: Proton Experimental (required — A Way Out's EA/Origin account linking does not work on other Proton versions for me)

I confirm:

• [x] that I haven't found an existing compatibility report for this game.
• [x] that I have checked whether there are updates for my system available.

steam-1222700.log

Symptoms

A Way Out: Periodic, regular-interval audio crackling, present even sitting idle in the main menu (no gameplay, no multiplayer connection required to reproduce). No PipeWire xruns are reported (pw-top clean) while it happens. Cutscene audio progressively drifts out of sync with the video — audio and video start perfectly synced at the beginning of a cutscene, and the offset grows worse the longer the cutscene runs.

Squad: Same as A Way Out

I suspect these two may share a root cause given they both appeared/are present on this GPU and both point away from a standard audio-config explanation (see below).

Reproduction

A Way Out: Launch the game, reach any in-engine cutscene, and observe audio drifting behind video over the course of the scene. Or just observe the crackle in the menu.

Squad: Launch the game and sit at the main menu; crackling is audible immediately, at a steady repeating interval.

Troubleshooting already performed (A Way Out)

• Confirmed genuine 60fps via MANGOHUD_CONFIG=fps_limit=60 (real, hard cap, not just gamescope's -r, which does not throttle the client render loop) — drift persists identically.
• Disabled Vulkan/VAAPI hardware video decode via GST_PLUGIN_FEATURE_RANK to force software decode — no change.
• Confirmed PipeWire graph and game audio stream both cleanly at 48000/48000 (pw-top, pw-metadata) — no resampling/rate mismatch.
• Confirmed stable TSC clocksource, no "TSC unstable" kernel warnings (dmesg | grep -i tsc).
• Confirmed via Proton log that XAudio2_7.dll is loaded native (not FAudio) — rules out FAudio reimplementation bugs.
• Ruled out Steam's media pre-transcode cache mechanism: the only bundled video file is the splash screen (Haze1/Content/Movies/splash_awo.mp4); in-game "cutscenes" are rendered live by the engine (UE-based), not pre-rendered video, so STEAM_COMPAT_TRANSCODED_MEDIA_PATH/fozmediav1 cache is a red herring for the actual gameplay cutscene drift (though the splash file itself does show Failed to find H264 bitstream filter / missing AAC codec_data errors in the log — possibly a separate, minor issue, since steamapps/shadercache/1222700/ never gets created on this system despite normal launches and "Verify integrity of game files").
• Tested all three Wine sync backends explicitly (PROTON_NO_NTSYNC=1 PROTON_NO_FSYNC=1 PROTON_NO_ESYNC=1, and ntsync alone disabled) — no change to the drift in any configuration. Default/active backend is ntsync (ntsync: up and running. in log).
• Tested PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 to bypass DXVK entirely — no change.
• Captured a perf record -g profile during active drift: 94.6% of sampled CPU time attributes to RenderThread 1, almost entirely inside the kernel's pi_state_update_owner (priority-inheritance futex) reached via repeated syscalls — but this did not correlate with any actual fix when sync backends were swapped, so it may be incidental rather than causal. Happy to attach the raw perf.data if useful.
• Ruled out compositor/display-server involvement: reproduces identically under Hyprland (Wayland) with render.explicit_sync/direct_scanout toggled, with PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND forced to 0 (XWayland) and left default, and with VRR disabled.
• Mesa is current (26.2.2) at time of testing — not a staleness issue.

Troubleshooting already performed (Squad)

• No PipeWire xruns (pw-top ERR column clean) during crackling.
• CPU governor tested on both schedutil and performance — no change.
• Tested with EasyAntiCheat via CPU affinity isolation (taskset -c 0-9 %command%) — no change.
• Squad's official "Sound Quality: Low" fix and disabling Steam Overlay — no change.
• No RGB/hardware-monitoring software running.
• Reproduces even in the main menu, before any multiplayer/netcode/EAC-scanning load would be expected.