Audio popping issue

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Originally Posted by XenophineEX

I've found all the new classes with super aoe seem to trigger sound stuttering. You would be hard pressed to find a tank that only does 3 at a time. 100% of the ones I have encountered even with 2 dragoons with limited aoe, run about gathering half the dungeon only to then have the sound cut out horribly. And then have the fight take 4x longer than it should.

Too many WoW refugee's, they are adopting their old methods in a new game; And it is breaking it.

Don't even try to tell them to slow down either, the tank will proclaim he is the only dps needed. And you will forfeit your commendations. Just stay silent, and deal with the fallout.

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You can be in the Rising Stones and reproduce the audio stuttering after 3 combos. Unless you wanna blame that on "WoW refugees" too? What even is this logic, we're dealing with tech issues here not some weird cultural issue.

Found content that is not affected by audio issues.
ARR extreme primal fights.
Whorleater, striking tree are issue free zone.
Moogles are, however, problematic.

Apparently they did not bother implementing spatial audio for most of ARR extreme content.

Coming back just to say that I had almost no stuttering while in Holminster Switch while something like the Sunken Temple of Qarn is nigh unbearable.

Meanwhile, squeezix support amuses themself by asking for specifics about my system after I've provided them with msinfo and dxdiag.
Apparently they are asking for msinfo and dxdiag because it's a tradition to do so, actually using them is heresy.

I too have been having this issue ever since EW's release and it's rather frustrating to say the least. The game is....playable, but there's only so much of the choppiness I can take in a sitting. It seems to happen only during battle or if I'm interacting with something like my retainers or gathering or crafting.

I set the Listening Position to 100 on the Character and that seems to....help a little. Doesn't solve it, but it seems to do it a little less.

I've fussed with graphics, shut things down, and nothing else has worked. Everything is up to date too.

CPU: AMD FX(tm)-4300 Quad-Core Processor - (4 CPUs), ~3.8GHz

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Originally Posted by XenophineEX

I've found all the new classes with super aoe seem to trigger sound stuttering. You would be hard pressed to find a tank that only does 3 at a time. 100% of the ones I have encountered even with 2 dragoons with limited aoe, run about gathering half the dungeon only to then have the sound cut out horribly. And then have the fight take 4x longer than it should.

Too many WoW refugee's, they are adopting their old methods in a new game; And it is breaking it.

Don't even try to tell them to slow down either, the tank will proclaim he is the only dps needed. And you will forfeit your commendations. Just stay silent, and deal with the fallout.

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What even is this logic? How is something on Square's side of things new players faults? This is extremely rude and also wrong. I've had stuttering on new and old classes alike. Been leveling my Dancer and White Mage and it has been just as choppy as Sage. Class makes no difference nor is it the fault of WoW players.

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Originally Posted by MoonstalkerZ

I did some testing with the equalizer bars and crafting while facing away from the camera, which fairly reliably produces the audio stuttering. I've posted my results in my bug thread here.

I've also been reading through the bug reports posted on these forums. Someone said a few pages ago they knew someone with a Phenom CPU had no stuttering issues, and speculated that Phenom CPUs wouldn't cause this problem - however, this bug report indicates a user with a Phenom CPU is having the stuttering bug. So now we're up to FX, Ryzen, Phenom, and i7 CPUs having this problem, as well as (anecdotally) consoles - however this last only comes from something a forum poster reported reading in shout chat. If we could get someone on the forum with a PS4 or PS5 to confirm they have the stuttering bug, this would be a great help.

It's entirely possible that one source of the problem is something that happens with the CPU, but if it's happening with every type of CPU, then just getting a new CPU isn't going to fix the problem.

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I haven't found videos on PS4/PS5 stutter, however, I did find some evidence of some twitter users (who play on console) with it. This was back on December 5th, so unsure if it has been fixed or not for them. Possibly not, because of pc users having issues yet.
https://twitter.com/RaijinOkami/stat...91769109651464

Adding to those digging into the CPU troubleshooting, I'm running an AMD FX 9370 (8 core @ 4.4ghz each). I also, like everyone else here, had no issues until 6.0. Installing the spatial audio did help in my case-until 6.01, which made things worse. Another user graciously mentioned that immerse (the spatial audio software) did release an updated version. Installing this again did help in my case, but of course, the audio still becomes broken for (insert the hundreds of causes) after a while.

The only system adjustment that made a difference (I tried pretty much all of them listed in various places in this thread) was adjusting power settings. I never realized I was in 'balanced' mode, likely because it's never been an issue until now. So to anyone else that may have a similar setup to mine, enabling the spatial audio and creating a new power profile setting helps with the stuttering not occurring as frequently.

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Originally Posted by Jadilus

Adding to those digging into the CPU troubleshooting, I'm running an AMD FX 9370 (8 core @ 4.4ghz each). I also, like everyone else here, had no issues until 6.0. Installing the spatial audio did help in my case-until 6.01, which made things worse. Another user graciously mentioned that immerse (the spatial audio software) did release an updated version. Installing this again did help in my case, but of course, the audio still becomes broken for (insert the hundreds of causes) after a while.

The only system adjustment that made a difference (I tried pretty much all of them listed in various places in this thread) was adjusting power settings. I never realized I was in 'balanced' mode, likely because it's never been an issue until now. So to anyone else that may have a similar setup to mine, enabling the spatial audio and creating a new power profile setting helps with the stuttering not occurring as frequently.

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I'm currently using a combination of adjusting power settings, setting task priority to high on task manager and using DX9. It's annoying to have to do this setup everytime I log into the game, but has made it somewhat playable for me so far.

It's no miracle solution obviously, audio still gets choppy on combat sometimes, so I'm definitely not doing any endgame content until the devs sort it out, but at least I can now watch cutscenes without the crackling and static ruining the mood and experience, so I'm finally going to finish msq this holiday.

Then I'm going to wait for an official fix, because honestly, I'm exhausted of looking for solutions. My trust on SE was broken and I'm never preordering anything from them again until I'm 100% sure they're not going to announce any gimmicky feature.

The start of EW Early access,I haven't been able to play the game I am paying for..This sucks,but I'm pretty sure they are going to be adding more free time cause of the MANY problems

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Originally Posted by Jadilus

Adding to those digging into the CPU troubleshooting, I'm running an AMD FX 9370 (8 core @ 4.4ghz each). I also, like everyone else here, had no issues until 6.0. Installing the spatial audio did help in my case-until 6.01, which made things worse. Another user graciously mentioned that immerse (the spatial audio software) did release an updated version. Installing this again did help in my case, but of course, the audio still becomes broken for (insert the hundreds of causes) after a while.

The only system adjustment that made a difference (I tried pretty much all of them listed in various places in this thread) was adjusting power settings. I never realized I was in 'balanced' mode, likely because it's never been an issue until now. So to anyone else that may have a similar setup to mine, enabling the spatial audio and creating a new power profile setting helps with the stuttering not occurring as frequently.

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Hey there, I've got the same setup, and exactly same issue occurrence. Only thing that did completely annihilate the stutter for me was playing or rather is playing in DX9. Graphics are underwhelming but you might wana give it a shot!

Also to add additional things I've tried : In the end I opted for a complete OS reboot, factory settings, I've completely reinstalled windows, the drivers, etc. Did not help at all, just in case somebody wants to try that, so you know that most likely it will not work.

Hey, I had a few issues like this too. Sometimes My audio randomly just cuts for a few seconds and then recovers. Thankfully I don't really mind that stuff, jankyness has always been something I tolerate often and well. But there's this one time where the audio just simply flat-out stopped working during a roulette I was doing. All sounds, be it Music, SFX, voices and voices simply just stopped. I had to pull a hard reset to just to fix it- which is definitely something I don't want when the queues are hundreds of players long.

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Originally Posted by Grimno

The fact this was tweeted

"The Community team will be AFK until Jan. 4, 2022! Person running
We've got some posts lined up and helpers keeping an eye out for issues... but we'll probably still pop in from time to time anyway!"

has me believing a lot of Square will be closed for the Holidays for a while, which I mean, that's expected.
But this I assume means it'll be a week or so more before we hear of anything if we do hear of anything...

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While that was posted on the English language account @FF_XIV_EN, there has been no such tweet on the Japanese account @FF_XIV_JP.
While, as far as I know, christmas isn't even a holiday in Japan, it might indeed be possible that they take up to a week off around Jan 1st, but I don't think anything like that has been announced yet.
All we know is 6.05 is coming out on the 4th.

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Originally Posted by minopoki

While, as far as I know, christmas isn't even a holiday in Japan, it might indeed be possible that they take up to a week off around Jan 1st, but I don't think anything like that has been announced yet.
All we know is 6.05 is coming out on the 4th.

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Christmas is a holiday, but I think more in line with how the US and Canada celebrates our respective Thanksgivings. A time for the family to get together, relax, and eat KFC.

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Originally Posted by minopoki

While that was posted on the English language account @FF_XIV_EN, there has been no such tweet on the Japanese account @FF_XIV_JP.
While, as far as I know, christmas isn't even a holiday in Japan, it might indeed be possible that they take up to a week off around Jan 1st, but I don't think anything like that has been announced yet.
All we know is 6.05 is coming out on the 4th.

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I apologize for being a pessimist but there is a zero chance that it's gonna be fixed at 4th. Don't get your hopes up or you will experience the same anger and disappointed as with the last patch. Perhaps in 3 months we will get our audio repaired.

I've been lurking this thread for a while and this is my first post on the forums so...apologies if I mess up something..

But after having no issues until 6.0, and no change for better or worse with 6.01, I wanted to provide a possible alleviation that happened for me (not a total solution, because I still get stutters maybe 5% of the time, when it used to be like 95%...so I'll take it!)

This won't be a problem if you're one to take care of your computer properly...but I'm a gremlin...Today, I vacuumed the innards of my computer because I needed to move it and it was dusty as hell and not cleaned in years. Cleaned out the fans and used a brush to knock loose caked up dust. After I set it up again...barely any audio issues. I used to have unbearable stuttering 100% of the time in PVP and combat situations, and 70-90% of the time in dungeons, overworld, cutscenes

Now I only experienced a couple seconds of very mild stuttering during PVP. My other roulettes, overworld, and in-town went fine. I havent gotten to do any cutscenes, and have yet to try the infamous P4N raid, but I'm very glad so far (too bad I already played thru MSQ on mute half the time...)

I will note that the other change I did was changing my sound settings to surround sound since I had the speakers for it but left it on stereo mode. (no change since pre-6.0) I don't really think this made a difference but I'll just put it out there...

UPDATE: very short and mild stutter in P4N. Changing settings back to stereo resulted in no difference (I have used these speakers from 5.0 so the only thing changed was the settings. The rear speakers do not emit sound from FFXIV regardless.) which means the only difference was me cleaning the computer x_x

Here's my specs as well, from the launcher config bc I dont really understand it:
windows 10 64 bit
intel core i7 950 @ 3.07 GHz (8CPUs) ~3.1GHz
RAM 6 GB
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti

I'm also on DirectX11 because DX9 caused me to D/C too often, which was unfavorable because of queues.


TL;DR if you havent cleaned your computer in years, try vacuuming the dust out, it might help?? There's definitely still an issue on their end because I get the occasional stutter but this alleviated like 90% of the instances

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Originally Posted by hasuyaki

I will note that the other change I did was changing my sound settings to surround sound since I had the speakers for it but left it on stereo mode. (no change since pre-6.0) I don't really think this made a difference but I'll just put it out there...

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This is probably what helped for you. From what the audio experts picked apart earlier in this thread and others, it seems as if the new sound engine is built entirely around surround sound (because of that stupid third party audio plugin). Which means that anyone running in stereo because they're using stereo speakers or a headset or something other than surround sound speakers gets the bug full blast. All because SE coded the sound engine to *only* do surround spatial audio.

I did an interesting experiment.

I went into the settings for my speakers. (Right-click speaker icon in the bottom right of Windows -> Sounds -> Playback -> Selected my speakers -> Properties)
The very last tab at the top of the properties window? Spatial Sound. I turned this on (and had to restart FF, because of course I did). When I got back in game, the sound was muted, muddy, and sounded "underwater". I normally play with FF's Master Sound at 30 and my PC sound at 40% (because my speakers get -loud-) With the Windows Spatial Sound turned on, I had to crank FF's Master Sound all the way up to 100% as well as crank my PC sound up to 70% just to get an equivalent sound level. (For comparison, before I fired FF up again, I unpaused the video I'd been watching on Hulu. The sound level was exactly the same *after* I turned on Spatial Audio as before, which indicates that the issue with spatial audio is in FF, not anywhere else.)

I went to the Rising Stones and fired off Dyskrasia. It definitely took more casts than normal (7-8 instead of 2-3) to break the sound engine. But it still broke.

What's perhaps most interesting to me is that Windows comes equipped with a Spatial Sound option that exactly mimics what people have said that the stupid third party plugin does: muted sound, muddy sound, underwater sound.

Funny that SE would push us to buy a plugin that Windows comes with for free, no? Especially if they both mess up audio in the exact same way.

is it possible to set to surround regardless of what device you have? my sound stuttered regardless if it was on speaker or earbuds (the cheap $20 kind I use for my phonecalls) , but now it works regardless of speaker or earbuds

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Originally Posted by hasuyaki

is it possible to set to surround regardless of what device you have? my sound stuttered regardless if it was on speaker or earbuds (the cheap $20 kind I use for my phonecalls) , but now it works regardless of speaker or earbuds

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That is what I was going to do when I stumbled across the Windows default Spatial Sound setting.

Setting speaker output to surround 5.1 OR 7.1 does not fix the problem.

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Originally Posted by Maeklos

That is what I was going to do when I stumbled across the Windows default Spatial Sound setting.

Setting speaker output to surround 5.1 OR 7.1 does not fix the problem.

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ah yeah...that's another thing, mine wasnt 5.1 or 7.1, it's quadraphonic(?) ...i should try setting it back to stereo and see what happens

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Originally Posted by hasuyaki

ah yeah...that's another thing, mine wasnt 5.1 or 7.1, it's quadraphonic(?) ...i should try setting it back to stereo and see what happens

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Sound also breaks with quadraphonic sound. Tested it just now.

It took more casts of Dyskrasia to break the sound (8), but it still broke. I've taken to logging out in the Rising Stones, just to make testing iterations easier.

Aight, decided to give this a go too since i saw it. Changing to quadraphonic, and having my sound format settings at the lowest I could get 16bits, 44100hz (CD), while also having disabled the spatial audio managed to remedy stuttering almost entirely for me!

When I say almost, its really strange when it stutters. After doing many job tests including Sage since I've seen few people mentioning it before, both EW trials (normal and EX), various dungeons and raids from roulette and one hunt train. 0 stutter,
HOWEVER only when I'm inside my house trying to open retainers, or even interacting with the summoning bell, causes immense stutter. I got no idea whats going on, but yh wanted to share this

Man, I had hoped to find some kind of a work-around fix but the ones found so far don't work for me for various reasons. It sucks because I didn't have the sound issue until the 6.01 patch reportedly 'fixed' the audio issues too. :(

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Originally Posted by Raikaris

Man, I had hoped to find some kind of a work-around fix but the ones found so far don't work for me for various reasons. It sucks because I didn't have the sound issue until the 6.01 patch reportedly 'fixed' the audio issues too. :(

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Yh, sucks hard man, I know quite a few people that have actually started having issues since the update to 6.01.

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Originally Posted by Raikaris

Man, I had hoped to find some kind of a work-around fix but the ones found so far don't work for me for various reasons. It sucks because I didn't have the sound issue until the 6.01 patch reportedly 'fixed' the audio issues too. :(

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At least you had the opportunity to play for close to 3 weeks without your ears bleeding! ;^) I wish most of us here had been so lucky.

Geez you really went all out with a reformat and all huh? Well thanks for sharing what helped, it's so sad that we have to resort to all this but I'll see if DX9 makes a difference, :( Cheers!

So more interesting results, all with these settings: Listening Position 62, Party Effects-Limited, Others Effects-None, Object Quantity-Low.

I got zero audio stuttering at all in the first three floors of the new raid. Then in the fourth floor, I got the normal amount; changing Listening Position to 100 reduced its frequency greatly but did not eliminate it 100%, just like what happens in other duties that have stuttering. The stuttering in the fourth floor didn't seem to coincide with any special skills or events either. Hell, it happened even while the boss was only casting a simple raidwide attack with no special floor effects active or anything. Perhaps healers and others were casting several reduction abilities that I couldn't see because of Limited Party Effects, although you can still HEAR those effects, so I'm not sure if that setting is really doing anything, but it felt like it might have had an effect in Alliance Raids.

I really am at a loss here. It's like there's almost no consistency. It's crazy that it varies so much not only between people but for a single person as well.

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Originally Posted by hasuyaki

TL;DR if you havent cleaned your computer in years, try vacuuming the dust out, it might help?? There's definitely still an issue on their end because I get the occasional stutter but this alleviated like 90% of the instances

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Dust can cause ton of heat (took me a while to learn this), and heat can cause thermal throttling (CPU slowing down to not overheat). Throttling seems to greatly affect this issue, more than it affects other things by far. Like you're saying, there's definitely something wrong, and while CPU throttling can slow everything down, it has a dramatically larger effect on the sound it seems - because something is wrong.

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Originally Posted by Teiren

I really am at a loss here. It's like there's almost no consistency. It's crazy that it varies so much not only between people but for a single person as well.

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Yeah, it's really inconsistent, and I think that's why there's so many times people think it's better and then it "breaks again" - because it was never better, it's just intermittent sometimes. It comes and goes seemingly randomly.

Turning the visuals for party and self effects had no effect for me when I was testing in the inn, where it was very, very consistent and I was taking the video in my bug report. I didn't get that part in the video, but I did play with it a lot. I have macros to adjust the effects in 4 different ways, 3 of which I normally use anyways, and one for turning even self effects off that I made just to test. Even with nothing visible, they had the same stuttering effect.

I did briefly show the object quantity, and I think just left it on minimum, just to show it really did nothing at all too. It might be different with different setups though, since a couple things people said worked did nothing for me.

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Originally Posted by Maeklos

It took more casts of Dyskrasia to break the sound (8), but it still broke. I've taken to logging out in the Rising Stones, just to make testing iterations easier.

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Is that consistent? I mean, if you relog and do the same thing like 4-5 times, do you get the same results with the same settings? It seems like 7 or 8 might just be from randomness.

Running on an AMD FX 8350 8-core (4.0 gigs) also having the stuttering issue. As I mentioned before, I didn't have this issue until the 6.01 patch. Before the patch the only issue I had was what everyone else experienced at peak times.. Extremely long ques to log in. After the patch horrible stuttering in instances and in cutscenes. Someone in SE made a mistake somewhere.

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Originally Posted by NyteKitsune

Running on an AMD FX 8350 8-core (4.0 gigs) also having the stuttering issue. As I mentioned before, I didn't have this issue until the 6.01 patch. Before the patch the only issue I had was what everyone else experienced at peak times.. Extremely long ques to log in. After the patch horrible stuttering in instances and in cutscenes. Someone in SE made a mistake somewhere.

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Same core, but issues started with 6.0.

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Originally Posted by AeroXaia

Is that consistent? I mean, if you relog and do the same thing like 4-5 times, do you get the same results with the same settings? It seems like 7 or 8 might just be from randomness.

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Breaking the sound engine without tinkering with any settings is consistent (usually taking 2-3 casts to break it). So anything that pushes it that far back is an anomaly.

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Originally Posted by Maeklos

I did an interesting experiment.

I went into the settings for my speakers. (Right-click speaker icon in the bottom right of Windows -> Sounds -> Playback -> Selected my speakers -> Properties)
The very last tab at the top of the properties window? Spatial Sound. I turned this on (and had to restart FF, because of course I did). When I got back in game, the sound was muted, muddy, and sounded "underwater". I normally play with FF's Master Sound at 30 and my PC sound at 40% (because my speakers get -loud-) With the Windows Spatial Sound turned on, I had to crank FF's Master Sound all the way up to 100% as well as crank my PC sound up to 70% just to get an equivalent sound level. (For comparison, before I fired FF up again, I unpaused the video I'd been watching on Hulu. The sound level was exactly the same *after* I turned on Spatial Audio as before, which indicates that the issue with spatial audio is in FF, not anywhere else.)

I went to the Rising Stones and fired off Dyskrasia. It definitely took more casts than normal (7-8 instead of 2-3) to break the sound engine. But it still broke.

What's perhaps most interesting to me is that Windows comes equipped with a Spatial Sound option that exactly mimics what people have said that the stupid third party plugin does: muted sound, muddy sound, underwater sound.

Funny that SE would push us to buy a plugin that Windows comes with for free, no? Especially if they both mess up audio in the exact same way.

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I figured I'd try this, bcs I'm grasping at straws. I also tried the quadraphonic sound.
In world FATEs still triggered it BAD. Once it started I even the sound menue was broken for way longer than usual. I loaded into a Trial to see how it goes with other players in a smaller instance. Ended up with Shiva (Hard) and it happend a few times. Less than usual (maybe I'm just huffing copium) but still noticably annoying. Once I loaded back into the world it stuttered again. I wasn't in combat nor next to other players.

I've not been playing for the past week+ only logging in to test someones newst idea to fix it. Not only is it that much worse since 6.01 but I have the feeling it's getting worse everyday. (Whilst I felt in the time from 6.0 to 6.01 it got better everyday.)

Snipped the quote:

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Originally Posted by MiaShino

...increase the audio buffer (this may introduce slight audio delay but is highly preferable to crackling audio) or add option for number of audio channels into the sound options going forward....

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Thank you for mentioning audio buffer. I recall having reduced my audio latency, and removing that (i.e. increasing latency back to default) fixed the popping/crackling problems for me. I don't play on Windows though, so I'm not sure how to check that on Windows in general.

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Originally Posted by Jizu

Ended up with Shiva (Hard) and it happend a few times. Less than usual (maybe I'm just huffing copium) but still noticably annoying. Once I loaded back into the world it stuttered again. I wasn't in combat nor next to other players.

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Shiva and other ARR trials do seem to be alright (I had Shiva myself last night with no problems), so long as you aren't playing a melee class. If you're playing a healer or caster and standing at the edge of the fight, you might notice that it doesn't shutter much (if at all). I think that's because ARR trials were basically just empty arenas with next to zero visual clutter, nothing that could cause positional audio issues. Which is why I think I've had zero problems in Shiva and Ifrit, but Tsukoyomi and other post-ARR trials I've had have broken from the outset.

Now, if you're playing a melee class with abilities firing off all around you, or playing in a later trial, then the problem explodes.

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Originally Posted by -BlueGreen-

Indeed, the Phenom-series CPUs are unaffected. My wife runs a 12 year old Phenom II X4, stock settings and hasn’t had any trouble with the update. Someone some pages back talked about the architecture of the FX series and how multiple cores share the same floating point modules causing cores to potentially be bottlenecked if the tasks (like spatial audio processing) relies too heavily on floating point math.

I’m assuming the Phenom II series doesn’t have that problem. Apparently a Phenom II can be put in an AM3+ socket, so I’m tempted to pick up a Phenom II X4 or X6 and “downgrade” my CPU to work around this.

Something FX 8XXX series people might try is using motherboard settings to turn off half the cores. I tried this with my FX 4100, and while it seemed to smooth out the sound a bit, I had nowhere near enough remaining CPU bandwidth to actually run the game above single digit FPS (in fact, sometimes the sound would stutter, but the cpu was maxed at 100% at 0 FPS, meaning that 2 cores isn’t enough for the sound alone). The idea is by taking half the cores offline, the remaining cores get exclusive access to the floating point modules so that the overall pipeline no longer gets backlogged trying to schedule floating point tasks with CPU cores that are idling due to the floating point modules being maxed out.

If spatial audio with such complex processing is the future of gaming, perhaps we need advances to offload these computations to the GPU, or perhaps make some sort of audio processing module that can handle these kinds of tasks (think beefed up sound card).

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Don't make blanket statements like this! One post above yours I detail how I happened to get this bug ever since 6.01 came out, and guess what... I have a AMD Phenom II X6.

Hey everyone, wanted to chime in with my experience although it is different than what a lot of you outlined, I wanted to post my fix just in case there are others that happen to be in my position as well. So I was experiencing similar audio (and sometimes visual) stuttering that a lot of people have outlined since Endwalker released. I tried lowering all settings, exiting all processes, switching the audio channel, etc etc. Nothing was working (except switching to DX9 did help a little, but not completely) until finally I found that switching the Power Plan of my desktop helped. (Can be searched via Power Options > Additional Power Options). It was originally on "Performance" and switching it to "Balance" fixed all of my issues for me.

Keep in mind, mine is probably more of a very specific case where it was on my end, and doesn't have anything to do with the sound bug that has been confirmed, but it has been reported that Windows 10 has an issue with these power plans and bottlenecking applications.

I thought I'd come back with more of my own experimentation. I'd started to try to write a bug report, but I realized there was some things I hadn't tried yet that I probably really should first, since I'm sitting here with such an ancient CPU, I want to have all my ducks in a row so they don't laugh any report I make away. lol I've also mostly been testing in FATES, since they're quick to test. I really need to venture into more things. So, yeah, I'm not sure I'm any closer to making one yet... as my results have been as interesting as they are headscratching.

It was good few pages back so... I'm here with an Athlon II X4. Athlon II's are siblings to the Phenom cpus, the difference being they lack L3 cache. Mine's on the lower end, a 620 which sports only 2.6mhz (which prolly is bottlenecking my gtx 670 lol) That it's been doing so well with the game has been miraculous. I'm comfortably still in the 50-60 fps range most of the time, only few spots really tanking it. (Like, y'know, Limsa aetheryte plaza lmao)

I'd really had no troubles until the patch dropped. I do a fair bit of streaming, so I literally even have video in FATES before the patch with the audio all hunky dory, then after and the audio is stuttering horribly.

Initially I tried what everyone was talking about, priority in Task Manager and adjusting the audio quality and I tried swapping from the nvidia hdmi output to my onboard sound with some speakers... and the more I poked at these things, it just seemed to get WORSE somehow. Even on a clean boot, with every background thing closed. It was somehow now unbearable, even getting that crackling in the loading screen. So much I threw up my hands and plum did a restore point before the patch even... which by all rights shouldn't have done anything, but seemingly it reset to normal sucky again instead of ungodly bad.

Next, I decided I guess I really should try dx9... WELL. I didn't test long enough tbh... I prolly should try it a bit more, but I didn't notice any audio problems the few FATES I did, but it felt awful to play with my fps dropped drastically. I couldn't stand it, so I rebooted and set it back to dx11 and got back on.

...the stuttering somehow had lessened even more. Why? I have no idea. It really does not make a lick of sense. It didn't completely go. One fate would be fine, the next, it'd be there here and there. It really seems to depend on the sounds and how many are playing at the same time, from what I've experienced. The more sounds layering, the more it seems to have issue. Like I found a certain, uh, new cactuar has an attack that's VERY noisy, and dear god, does that cause stutter. Single combat? It's fine. But really does make you headscratch how then does issues pop up in the *loading screen*?

Around this time, I decided it was time I updated XIV on my lappy to see how it would do. My laptop is a MSI cx61... not specifically a gaming lappy, but it still sported a nvidia 640m and it has an i5 3210m 2.5mhz that turbos to 3.1. It's an 8-9 year old lappy now. I used to play a lot on it, but the gpu is struggling a bit more with the game these days, but yeah, it was hunky dory with the audio though. No stuttering at all.

So I went back to my desktop. I decided to yolo. (I do not recommend to anyone to try this, lemme make that clear right here. lol) I've pondered the idea of overclocking my cpu a little for awhile... it's meant to oc quite well, so I finally went for it. I didn't go remotely as far as it can potentially be nudged up to, but it's now happily sitting at 3.2mhz. I wanted to give this a shot cause I'd been watching Performance in Windows Task Manager and noticed when the stutters happened, it was making some REALLY huge cpu spikes, that were peaking to 100 usage.

Well. I played a bunch last night while in a Discord call, and... things seemed fine?! I didn't notice any stutter. I even set the objects number back to 'normal' over the change to 'low'. I haven't streamed yet, so that'll be the big test, but yeah. I'm not here suggesting remotely that WELL THAT FIXED THAT, cause watch, knowing my luck, I'll play today and it'll come back. lol

SO yeah. It's so baffling and curious... especially how all you with FX cpus are having even more problems then our Phenom/Athlon II chips. (It seems a bit like FX chips are having their own particular issue... I've yet to see any audio issues in cutscenes, for example.) Not to mention the many other types of cpus that are having issues too. I also can't figure out how such silly things as swapping to dx9 then back to dx11 could possibly change anything. That makes 0 sense. Unexplainable oddities aside, it does feel a bit like though the changes to audio just aren't... well optimized perhaps? Like for not having spatial audio enabled, why is the audio spiking the cpu? But Idk. Just musings. These are things only SE can figure out and I'm an artist, not a programmer. lmao

Made an account just to post a bug report, though I have absolutely no hope that this will be fixed in 6.05.
The closest I've come to just being able to enjoy the game as I did before is having a friend stream their audio to me over discord. :\

Same issue, extreme sound stuttering during raids. Makes game miserable to play.

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Originally Posted by Vyriun

Hey everyone, wanted to chime in with my experience although it is different than what a lot of you outlined, I wanted to post my fix just in case there are others that happen to be in my position as well. So I was experiencing similar audio (and sometimes visual) stuttering that a lot of people have outlined since Endwalker released. I tried lowering all settings, exiting all processes, switching the audio channel, etc etc. Nothing was working (except switching to DX9 did help a little, but not completely) until finally I found that switching the Power Plan of my desktop helped. (Can be searched via Power Options > Additional Power Options). It was originally on "Performance" and switching it to "Balance" fixed all of my issues for me.

Keep in mind, mine is probably more of a very specific case where it was on my end, and doesn't have anything to do with the sound bug that has been confirmed, but it has been reported that Windows 10 has an issue with these power plans and bottlenecking applications.

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Can confirm, changing power modes does *not* help with FX-related audio bugs. :(