Rocksmith 2014 Remastered - Sound Cuts Out & Visuals Lag / Rubberband - I Changed Nothing - Worked One Day - Next Day Didn't

[Northman737]

 

I have been running Rocksmith 2014 on my current system since 2021 without any issues at all until just a couple days ago. I played it one night, recorded my play with Streamlabs OBS on Rocksmith on that night. Uploaded some of those videos to my YouTube Channel the following day. I have done the same thing for years. That following day though, I loaded up Rockcksmith to practice / play and all of the sudden, the first song I attempted played like normal for a short while then all of the sudden the sound cut out completely for a solid 2 or 3 seconds. The game sound, my guitar sound, all gone. Then the sound came back all of the sudden and the visuals rubber-banded back roughly the equivalent to how long it had gone without sound. Then it played normally again for a short while and it would repeat this. In a 4 minute song it would do that 4 or 5 times. It was long enough and bad enough that it made it completely unplayable and certainly I wasn't getting any recordings for my YouTube out of it. For a week now I've been trying to figure this out and still nothing. 

My System Specs:

Processor - AMD Ryzen 9 5900X Processor (12X 3.7GHz/64MB L3 Cache)

Cooling - NZXT Kraken 240mm AIO CPU Liquid Cooler

Memory - 32GB DDR4-3200 XPG D41 RGB

Video Card - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 - 10GB GDDR6X

Motherboard - GIGABYTE B550 AORUS PRO AC

Power Supply - 800 Watt - 80 PLUS Gold Certified

Primary Storage - 2TB Samsung 970 EVO PLUS M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD

Secondary Storage - 1TB Hard Drive -- 32MB Cache, 7200RPM, 6.0Gb/s - Single Drive
Sound Card

Operating System - Windows 11 Home - (64-bit)

 

I've not ever had an issue in Rocksmith even remotely like this before. It caused me to to start checking things and a lot of them. I don't know that in my case one was related to the other but I found my CPU cooler was going bad and I thought that might be the issue. I just replaced that cooler and I also wiped and restored my system and reinstalled Windows, Steam, Rocksmith, and everything else involved. In spite of all that I still am having the issue. I disabled "High Precision Event Timer" in my system settings. I also disabled "Microsoft Device Association Root Enumerator" in those settings as well. I changed all the Rocksmith settings to basically the lowest they could go visually as well. 

Before this started happening I didn't change a single setting on anything from the day it was working and had been since 2021 to the following day when it wasn't working all of the sudden. I've been playing Rocksmith 2014 Remastered since 2021 with no issues at all. Everything has consistently been smooth on both visuals and audio until a couple days ago. This stuttering / lagging of both sound and visuals only started a couple days ago and that's the first time I've ever had this occur. I came to find out out that my CPU cooling system was beginning to fail and was heating up. I thought this may have been what was causing it all and maybe it was but I just replaced Processor Cooler with a NZXT Kraken 240 RGB - 240mm AIO CPU Liquid Cooler yesterday. Everything is now running fine and cooling likewise. The only thing is that it did not clear up the stuttering and lag issue. 

I can go in Rocksmith and get it to work almost fine if I don't open Streamlabs OBS to record. Not to stream, just to record. If I record the issue is bad. If I just play though, I can tell the audio in Rocksmith isn't quite right but the sound doesn't cut completely out, it will just crack here and there without the actual charting lag and visual disturbance. It's annoying but it doesn't completely destroy the attempt. However, my entire YouTube I've been trying to build kind of hinges on being able to record and get good sound and play-throughs which I haven't been able to at all for a week now.

Some of these changes I've made have helped it a little bit because before did all of this I didn't even have to attempt to record for this lag / stutter to happen. I could simply open Rocksmith and start a song playing through without actually playing along or even touching my guitar and the sound would cut and the visuals would rubber-band. Now as long as I don't record I just get cuts that are a fraction of a second in sound without visual disturbance and it doesn't seem to screw up the play-through but it's noticeable audibly.

I've watched both my Task Manager and my NZXT Cam to see my system temperatures as well as processes / performance. My tempuratures aren't going above 50°C on either CPU or GPU at any point. There are no spikes occurring even momentarily. Additionally, CPU usage isn't really moving from around 4% and GPU usage is also hanging out at 4% while Memory usage is sitting at 25%. There is nothing showing up to indicate why all of the sudden this seems to be happening in Rocksmith. I notice no lag issues on streaming or sound in any other programs except Rocksmith and especially with OBS if I hit record at the same time. I had wondered if it might be the NVIDIA driver update that recently came out so I rolled that back to the previous which had been working and that did nothing to alleviate the issue. I reinstalled the new NVIDIA driver after that didn't work. I've checked all my drivers and everything is up to date. 

On top of all that, I even "Reset" my PC, reinstalled Windows, Steam, Rocksmith, CDLC, and literally everything else. In fact, since then I uninstalled and reinstalled Rocksmith again to be sure. Like I said though, other than Rocksmith I don't notice any sound or visual issies on the PC otherwise. With Rocksmith though, even while loading the game itself I believe that sometimes where there is supposed to be loading music and such, that will cut out briefly. It's very brief and something I would never have noticed before all of this started. For that reason I can't say if that ever really occurred before all of this problem started or not. 

I do use Custom CDLC's from CustomsForge.com as well but that is nothing new and I hadn't added any new ones which may have caused the issue at the time when it started.

I have included a YouTube Link from my channel where I normally upload my music recordings to. I have thousands of songs uploaded there from the past couple years. Never before has this happened so I was happily playing, recording, and uploading right up until a couple days ago and now I can't do any of that. That video is only about 2 or 3 minutes but the first notable stutter occurs at about 39 to 40 seconds in, roughly. The second time it happens is at about 1:08 into the video. It happens again for the third time at about 1:40 into the video. At that point I had my proof of what was occurring and that it was still occurring so I shut it off at that point and only about half-way through the song. The Link Mentioned is Here: https://youtu.be/EvbdkstoDew