I’ve posted about this problem in a couple places, including the PCSX2 forums, and I haven’t gotten a lot of help. I’ll copy/paste what I wrote.
I’m on openSUSE Tumbleweed Linux, using the 1.5.0~git20191208 version of PCSX2.
Several months ago I noticed when I tried playing games in PCSX2, the audio is lagging. This is with the default SPU2-X settings (PortAudio, ALSA, TimeStretch, 300ms Latency). I notice the lag most when I’m on the menus. I move the cursor and about a second later the sound effect plays. The audio remains lagged into gameplay, too. I tested this with Suikoden IV, Suikoden III, Final Fantasy XII, and Wild Arms 3.
If I turn the latency down to 15ms, the lag is more or less gone, but the audio suffers from skipping and distortion. I can set it to 50ms to get rid of the skipping and distortion, but even then there’s a slight, noticeable delay.
I’ve tried switching to SDL and PulseAudio, but that doesn’t seem to make any difference. I also tried running the Windows version of PCSX2 in Wine to see if that’s any better, but alas, it suffers the same issues.
My PC specs:
OS: openSUSE Tumbleweed Linux
CPU: Intel Core i5-7500 3.4Ghz
RAM: 8GB
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB (official NVIDIA drivers, up to date)
It is entirely possible it’s some configuration issue outside of PCSX2. I tried testing the games using the newer Play! emulator, both the stand-alone version and the libretro core. The stand-alone had the same audio lag as PCSX2. The libretro core, on the other hand, seemed to have the audio synced, but the framerate was worse (around 50fps), which resulted in both audio and video quality problems.
Thing is, though, I don’t experience audio issues with any other game or application. Not native Linux game or games running in Proton, or even other emulators such as Dolphin or any other libretro cores (including Beetle PSX HW and PPSSPP). It seems to be exclusive to PS2 emulators, which makes zero sense to me.
It might be worth noting that I’m using the AppImage version of Play!, as that’s the only format the Automated Linux Builds are provided. I tried searching for it on OBS, but I had no luck.
… I booted over to Windows 10. I installed PCSX2 version 1.4.0 (the last stable version). The only settings I changed from the default were the controller mappings and setting the GPU plugin to use DirectX 11 (hardware) to render the video. The SPU2 plugin defaults to Xaudio2 with an audio latency of 100ms.
I tested Wild Arms 3, Suikoden Tactics, and Final Fantasy XII. All achieved perfect audio sync. Or at least good enough sync that I couldn’t notice any delay. Same exact computer as I tested on Linux with the 1.5.0 Git builds of PCSX2.
So, to summarize, PCSX2 and the AppImage version of Play! both suffer from rather bad audio lag on my Linux install. PCSX2 runs perfectly in Win10 on the same machine. No other Linux program appears to have any such issues with audio in any way. Could it possibly be a config issue somewhere? Could it be an issue with the PCSX2 plugin, and the Play! issues related to AppImage, thus being separate problems with the same symptoms?