buzzing sound in play mode (maybe GPU whining..?)

Hi all, so my game has been growing and something I’ve never noticed before is a buzzing sound.
I wear headphones and listen to music normally while working on my projects, but as I’ve been adding sounds into my game I haven’t had any music playing and that’s when I noticed a buzzing noise. Anyway theirs this very annoying buzzing sound that gets loud in play mode. Turning down the volume in windows didnt change anything, but my headphones have a volume knob and when I turn down the volume on them it gets quieter.

I’ve seen other people saying they have similar problem but the fixes don’t work for me.

Is anyone else getting/had the same problem? anyone have any ideas on how to fix?

EDIT: found a simi fix, I created a script and used “Aplication.targetFrameRate = 60;” and that killed the noise. but when I changed the value to 1000 the noise came back. My monitor is 60hz and I have VSync enabled but I still am obviously getting super high frames.

i’ve seen it in few projects also, i think its called coil whine.
enabling vsync can help, but not sure what else to do…

ok, and apologies for late reply. How would one enable vsync?

project quality settings,
7424534--908726--upload_2021-8-17_11-46-9.png

although not sure if that helped last time, i think other issue there was too small physics timestep.

and does it happen in heavy scene or even empty ones?

  • check on different computer if it stays the same with different hardware, it may be a production issue
  • if the buzzing sound changes or goes away on other devices (especially low power devices), then it is a hardware issue with your setup
  • check audio drivers too, make sure they are updated

The fact that the windows knob didn’t change it, but the headphones did tells exactly nothing, other than the speakers in your headphones are probably okay. Everything else is potential problem. Including your motherboard, sound chip/card, videocard and PSU.

Also check your source audio clips outside of unity. This way you can isolate the issue if it is hardware or Unity processing issue on your hardware.

it is happening in an empty project as well.

I dont belive it will be a hardware issue because its only ever happened in unity. I also dont have another computer to test it on which is annoying.

Coil whine typically comes from the graphics card itself, it doesn’t really travel through speakers / headphones.

This sounds more like the area around the headphone jack isn’t properly insulated and when power draw happens it caused interference and an audible buzz.

Ok ill look into that. maybe try with some other heaphones

Turn V-Sync On.

On the game window

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Did the headphones end up being the issue?

Can you doublecheck this isn’t a hardware issue?

I’ve only noticed this with 1. Unbalanced cabling for amp/dacs and 2. onboard audio (or even soundcards) where there is interference.

You should troubleshoot this by trying it out on a different setup (different computer, different headphones, bluetooth headphones etc.).

If indeed after that it is a Unity issue, then you can submit a repro.

This is what helped me. Just enabling V Sync in project settings doesn’t turn it on in game mode it seems like. Thanks for help, whining is gone on laptop, and PC doesn’t make extra noise neither. The problem only happened in editor play mode.

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This helped me too. Does anyone know why this happens?