I had the same audio crackling issues in Helldivers on Pop!_OS too. What fixed it for me was following mmstick's (Pop!_OS dev) instructions from his reddit post about audio crackling, particularly the headroom
advice (I think somewhere between 256-512 worked for me):
If you experience audio crackling, try changing the ALSA properties in
/usr/share/wireplumber/main.lua.d/50-alsa-config.lua
. Particularly theperiod-size
andheadroom
. Remove the leading--
from properties you are modifying. Log out and log back in after making changes. Note that any changes to this file will be overwritten on the next wireplumber update.First start with changing the headroom to
1024
, then2048
. Then try adjusting the period-size. Higher values increase latency and may reduce crackling. A lower period size decreases latency but requires more CPU.
Edit: also Pop!_OS uses pipewire by default for a few years now, not pulse audio
AMD is ideal but Nvidia is fine. Basically any game that would work on AMD will work on Nvidia (~~only exception I know of is the VR mode of Phasmophobia~~ edit: apparently this was fixed ~1yr ago). Gamepass still won't work though - blame Microsoft for that one.
That said, Nvidia has more of a performance hit when switching. Ancient Gameplays recently did a video comparing Nobara vs Windows 11, with both the RX 7900XTX and the RTX 4080 Super. These were his average results across 20 games:
RX 7900XTX: 1080p +2%, 1440p +0%, 4k -2.2%
RTX 4080S: 1080p -13.8%, 1440p -13%, 4k -10.2%
So your games will work. They just might run 10%-15% slower until you can snag an AMD card. If you're interested in fully committing, looks like most used 3080s are going for ~$500 on ebay, so you could probably get an AMD card and get most of your money back.