Asked others to verify this, and they did.
If you have rather decent speakers (5.1 seems to catch it easier) or really good crisp headsets, you’ll hear a low static noise whenever ue4 is open. if you minimize it its gone.
and as someone who always uses aforementioned crisp headset… the BRZZZZZZT static sound is driving me nuts.
Hey Luos,
This bug has been entered and is known by our Audio team. For reference the bug number is UE-8073. What we discovered is that it has nothing to do with the audio engine. Bypassing init of XAudio2 and launching with -nosound does nothing to affect the issue. Launching UE4 with -game results in the issue going away (no slate!).
The only thing that seems to affect it is the Slate UI. The generated noise is reproducible per UI widget. Hovering over the same widget (or clicking the same dropdown, etc) produces the same exact buzzing sound even between subsequent launches of the editor.
I am going to re-open this ticket as it had been closed due to priority of the issue according to how many users this was affecting in the wild. This is all the information I have on this issue at this time, and we appreciate you taking the time to report it.
Let me know if you have further questions or need additional assistance.
Cheers,
I think I can add some info about this problem. I first saw it in 4.2 back in 2014 and it’s still there in 4.13, and no doubt it will continue for many more versions.
The buzzing is caused by Slate
rendering. Each Slate frame causes
a tick sound that at high framerates
becomes a constant buzz.
Minimizing UE4 doesn’t actually
remove the sound, it’s just a lot quieter
because UE4 only updates at 3 frames
per second when minimized.
Other modern game engines also have
this problem, including Rockstar’s
RAGE engine and Valve’s Source
engine. This is clearly due to the
similar approaches being used to
render UI in various game engines.
If you have a USB 2.0 audio based device, try a USB 3 extension cable. It has an additional GND_DRAIN to address EMI.