Bluetooth audio stutters in screen off state

I am running Win11 24H2 on an asus laptop m3402ra. Since I bought this laptop 2 years ago I've been experiencing bluetooth stutters during playback when the screen turns off after idling out.

I've literally done everything there is in terms of updating drivers, bios, updates, you name it. I tried different combination of those and I've been to multiple repair centers.
The only thing that helps is disabling AMD GPU Driver in Device Manager. Only then the stutters go away. The recent observation I made is that If I play music through built-in speakers and I run powercfg -requests in powershell it shows that there's An audio stream is currently in use and also there's a driver specified which plays audio.

But when I use bluetooth to play audio there's no mention of audio streaming and there's no driver that plays audio.

I've seen endless number of posts about how their computer doesn't go to sleep because of some ghost audio stream but my situation is reversed. I have an actual audio stream but it doesn't show in powercfg.

Can anybody help me figure out what is going on?

On screenshots you can see the difference when the music is played with a usb speaker and with a bluetooth speaker (I tried JBL GO 2, 3, 4 and Airpods Pro 2). Both times the music is actively playing.

It has something to do with Bluetooth version 4.x (on your computer 5.x)
Just wait for about a minute and then connect the audio stream.

In this guide, we’ll discuss what Audio latency is, some of the common symptoms, and how to troubleshoot any issues you may encounter.

abactuon said:

It has something to do with Bluetooth version 4.x (on your computer 5.x)
Just wait for about a minute and then connect the audio stream.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the input. Could you clarify this a bit? I tried connecting bluetooth at very different points in time and never ever I have seen a bluetooth stream in powercfg -requests

FreeBooter said:

In this guide, we’ll discuss what Audio latency is, some of the common symptoms, and how to troubleshoot any issues you may encounter.

Click to expand...

Tinkering with this right now. Thanks. Will report back.

Good luck!

FreeBooter said:

Good luck!

Click to expand...

I ran LatencyMon to see what causes DPC latency to be high and noted that there are two drivers that have the highest dpc counts: ntoskrnl.exe and Wdf01000.sys.

ntoskrnl.exe - i think this is the legacy kernel caller thing.
But right now I don't know what to do with this info. Probably running Windows Performance Recorder + Windows Performance Analyzer is an option now to go deeper to see what causes DPC to run high. Pretty sure it will be something amd related

magrega said:

Could you clarify this a bit?

Click to expand...

I suggested testing with a BT 5.x device.
I have a somewhat similar problem when I turn on BT 4.0 speakers.
There is no such problem with BT 5.2 headphones.
I can't reproduce exactly your scenario.

Head over to Asus support site for your computer to install AMD Chipset Driver and Realtek Bluetooth Driver.

abactuon said:

I suggested testing with a BT 5.x device.
I have a somewhat similar problem when I turn on BT 4.0 speakers.
There is no such problem with BT 5.2 headphones.
I can't reproduce exactly your scenario.

Click to expand...

Both JBL GO 2 and 3 as well as AirPods Pro 2 are bluetooth 5+ version.

FreeBooter said:

Head over to Asus support site for your computer to install AMD Chipset Driver and Realtek Bluetooth Driver.

M3402RA - Support

www.asus.com

Click to expand...

My laptop has mediatek mt7921 wifi\bt module chip. Will it make sense instaling Realtek drivers? I've installed only mediatek ones.

magrega said:

JBL GO 2

Click to expand...

abactuon said:

View attachment 127196

Click to expand...

My mistake. Yes, go 2 is 4 bt version but I mostly testing with go 3 which is 5.1

So that's not it. I don't have a laptop to add more to that.

FreeBooter said:

In this guide, we’ll discuss what Audio latency is, some of the common symptoms, and how to troubleshoot any issues you may encounter.

Click to expand...

Thank you! This video gave me enough info to find out that ntoskrnl.exe was having a high DPC count despite LatencyMon showing me that everything is alright.

AMD Graphic driver caused DPC count of ntoskrnl.exe to go high, throttling cpu. I found this post on reddit and went to the second solution.

What I did was:
1. Downloaded and extracted PowerSettingsExplorer.zip contents
2. Launched PowerSettingsExplorer.exe as admin
3. Found 2 options: Processor Idle Demote Threshold and Processor Idle Promote Threshold
4. Unticked them
5. Went to power plan settings, found new options under "Processor Power Management" and set both to 100%

I understand that this is probably more of a workaround than a solution. I don't really know what these two options do but I think always running them at 100% without letting the system control them would lead to a faster CPU wear but at least this solution allows for experience I was hoping to achieve (which is a basic user laptop experience, jesus christ).