Steam Voice chat issue when playing Civ

[Sir Garlin]

When I play Civ VI online with my friend steam voice chat is extremley choppy on this game only. It's so bad I can't make out anythign he says. If I alt tab to any screen but the game chat works fine, it's only when I'm actively on the game it immediatley screws up. I can't figure out why anyone esle experience this or have a solution?

[Set]

I realize this is an old thread but I've had the same issue ever since Steam updated their voice chat. Basically eats up a ton more CPU resources, and since Civ 6 is a CPU intensive game, they fight for the CPU.

Only solution I've had so far has been to tab out like you mentioned, but with the new expansion things have gotten more choppy so I'm on the look out for solutions again. Basically going to come down to finding a low end voice client or setting up a small second computer for just voice since I have a few around. Not in the market to upgrade my CPU just yet.

Edit: Going to try settings steam.exe to High priority in Task Manager as well. Won't have results until I play with my friend again.

[Sir Garlin]

Originally posted by Set:

I realize this is an old thread but I've had the same issue ever since Steam updated their voice chat. Basically eats up a ton more CPU resources, and since Civ 6 is a CPU intensive game, they fight for the CPU.

Only solution I've had so far has been to tab out like you mentioned, but with the new expansion things have gotten more choppy so I'm on the look out for solutions again. Basically going to come down to finding a low end voice client or setting up a small second computer for just voice since I have a few around. Not in the market to upgrade my CPU just yet.

Edit: Going to try settings steam.exe to High priority in Task Manager as well. Won't have results until I play with my friend again.

That sucks. I tried to work with Steam to look into this issue and got completely blown off. (see here)

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/discussions/3/1742229167199151052/?tscn=1546671636

I've rebuilt a brand new computer with Ryzen 7, 64 gb ram, 1080 ti blah blah blah and elected to use Skype for now. I tried to get assistance so I could share it with everyone or provoke a patch but.... Steam support doesn't even care, its obvious in that linked post how they responded to me.

[Set]

^ Ah yeah, I certainly get the impression that they are just going to ignore it and hope people upgrade their hardware in our cases. Not a lot of games are as CPU intensive as Civ 6 so we're probably a small group that have trouble.

Seems like when I get around to upgrading I'll need to get a higher end Ryzen, my 2200G works great for everything else. Even works great for Civ 6 without the voice chat but combine the two and it's a no go. The friend I play with as well isn't keen on installing other voice clients either so there's that to contend with as well.

[Set]

Well the two computer system didn't work out well either, the laptop has some audio issue.

Went back to using Windowed mode on my desktop and setting the steam processes to High in task manager, switching back to that window when I hit end turn.

[Set]

My friend and I have noticed last night and tonight that if we start the voice chat after we've already loaded in to our campaign, the voice chat seems a lot smoother than when we would start it before launching the game. Much more than anything else we've tried so far.

I have still been putting the Steam related processes on High priority as well but next time I'm going to try not changing the processes to see the difference. However, I feel changing the timing of starting the call is what is actually making the difference here.


EDIT: While still an improvement over calling first, there was still some choppiness when I didn't set Steam processes to High in the details tab.

Seems like for me at least, loading in to the game before calling and setting Steam processes to high solved the issue. Tonight we even went back to the main menu to find an auto save a few times and the call held up. So next test will be to try the call after we get to the Civ main menu instead of all the way in.

[Set]

So it seems for us this is the process.

I run my game in windowed mode (makes it easier to tab out), we both get to the main Civ 6 menu, then start voice call on Steam. Then open Task Manager, sort by CPU usage, pause update speed and set the all higher CPU usage Steam processes to High priority (I ignore the ones at the bottom), then put update speed back on normal. Then we load our campaign and chat works flawlessly as well as the game runs better.

[Meow]

My friend fixed this problem by launching the game in Direct X 11 instead of Direct X 12. His graphics card was GTX 1070 and Windows 10. Unsure about other specs.