Audio popping issue

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Originally Posted by Iplewhelmed

I started having audio issues with the latest patch today after experiencing zero issues sinze launch, all I hear is a crackling noise (no ingame sound) on the startup screen right after the Square Enix logo, and then my game crashes to desktop without an error before I get to click on anything. It goes away by switching to directx9 in the launcher config, but when I actually log in on my character it has extremely low fps, stutters and crashes during intense player congregations like being in cities or hunt trains, rendering th egame nigh unplayable anyway.

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Same here. I have:

Nvidia RTX 2070 SUPER
Intel i5-9600K CPU @ 3.7 Ghz
Windows 10 Home


All up to date drivers. Things were totally fine up until today's patch. Game is completely unplayable now. The title screen was physically painful to sit through. No settings adjustments seem to have helped things at all.

Same thing different day. Sound stuttering is still almost completely dependent on my character's physical location in relation to whatever it is I am targeting.

I’ve had the same issue since EW. Thought for a moment my computer was trying to tell me it can’t handle another expansion. Can’t log in with the Qs to check if it’s fixed after patch update…

Not sure if this will work for everyone but I changed my equalizer settings (in game, sys config) to STANDARD and it worked. All popping and echos are gone. Sound quality isn't as good as the other special settings but it's better than nothing at this point! Hope this helps some people. I will keep updating this reply if any changes happen. I only heard a small glitch when transporting, but so far it seems to be working. The true test will be in a dungeon. UPDATE: It still has brief moments of popping but it is pretty quick. Although when it does it in a cutscene it really ruins the experience since it garbles what they are saying. UPDATE: underwater is always popping and now that we are in the Tempest area and it's on and off all the time... getting to the final area/dungeon it's all the time with the big giant shade guys in the city.. even my cutscenes have been all the time... I cannot enjoy the game this way.

Unfortunately still not fixed for me. Pushing volumes to 100 and listening position helps somewhat, but the thing I found that helped the most, and actually makes it go away completely is turning the camera to face my characters front. I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, from the rear doing a fight crackle crackle crackle, spin camera to look at the back of the mob (very difficult to play properly) it goes away. I don't get it at all.

Some of the fixes i've seen help for a while or in some places, but then it comes back. This is depressing :(

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Originally Posted by Talinthis

so instead of fixing it there are people that have the problem now when they didnt before. At least it is large enough to get noticed

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Yeah if there's a "good" side to this fix, it's that they seem to have broken it for more people now so maybe they'll stop ignoring it.

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Originally Posted by Caderyn

Unfortunately still not fixed for me. Pushing volumes to 100 and listening position helps somewhat, but the thing I found that helped the most, and actually makes it go away completely is turning the camera to face my characters front. I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, from the rear doing a fight crackle crackle crackle, spin camera to look at the back of the mob (very difficult to play properly) it goes away. I don't get it at all.

Some of the fixes i've seen help for a while or in some places, but then it comes back. This is depressing :(

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The same thing
https://youtu.be/8vjpjAj9Guo

Logged in, noticed the issue was persisting.
Made the recommended adjustment from the patch notes annnnd... it's still happening.

PLEASE PROPERLY ADDRESS THIS.
The sound and music in this game is phenomenal but having to play without my headphones on because the stuttering/popping literally is hurting my ears now is really, really disappointing.

ETA: I posted in this thread earlier, but I just want to repeat and confirm I NEVER had this issue prior to Endwalker Early Access.

Some new experiments were had. Now it seems the audio stutters if I have my character facing the same direction as my camera but it stops stuttering if I have my camera and character facing opposite directions.

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Originally Posted by Tokavo

The same thing
https://youtu.be/8vjpjAj9Guo

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Yes! This, exactly this. Its so bizarre.

Got a bit worse for me after the update.

Problems I'm having are pretty similar to others; Crackling/Stuttering sound during combat but spinning the camera a bit makes it go away for a second. It's starting to happen to me while gathering too. Loading screens crackle, Old Sharlayan crackles in areas like the Studium though not in the Aetheryte Plaza so it might not be a player model density issue. All I know for sure is that this new sound engine has ruined the playability of the game for a lot of people. I can still play for the most part, but I have to mute the sound for some instances because it just gets way too irritating. Hopefully they keep looking into this.

Can confirm the issue seems to have gotten even worse for me after update. Completely ruined the audio of the 4th raid fight, had to mute sound entirely it was so bad. We need an actual fix SE

I never had this issue since playing FFXIV. Ever. This started for me at the expac as well, and being a lover of what I can hear, this is truly disappointing to say the VERY least. I've tried reddit fixes, patch notes fix, forum fixes you name it I've tried it. Pandemonium 4 was horrific just now. The video someone linked in this thread is exactly what I'm experiencing. Please, for the love of God and Soken's work, FIX THIS!!!!!!!!!!! (I have no problems with sound on my system or other games at all)

The only way to play this game is with the audio off entirely. Otherwise it's audio stutters and 5fps

Try running it in dx9 version, it works for me atm. Even tho it did not work as a 'fix' prior to 6.01. Pleeeeease fix this, i'm literally developing headaches from the sound, and now eye tears from dx9 graphics :<

Got worse.
Way worse.
If prior to latest patch you could at least tolerate it, by now I just launch some netflix show on second display and watch it, while mashing buttons semi-randomly in dungeon.
Suggested solution did not work.

Same issue as everyone else. Never had a single audio problem in the year of playing FFXIV before Endwalker's + Spatial Audio's release, 100% smooth sailing! But now I can't avoid it. I've tried literally everything imaginable to no avail. It specifically happens for me if I move my camera an inch, and then it persists forever, unless I completely stop moving for a full minute. It causes headaches, I can't play with audio anymore, which is one of my favorite aspects of the game. It also happens in the Char Creation menu, when I get to the part where I'm either choosing a god or a server.

Woke up today excited; two weeks of waiting for a fix and all that. Nothing of the sort released today! Myself and many others have held off on playing Endwalker, the most anticipated expansion thus far, so that we could fully enjoy the lovely work the team put into the music & voices! And.. we still can't after a supposed promised fix that seems like it didn't actually come. Extremely cool. It's frustrating.. you clearly broke it, so you need to fix it. This is non-negotiable.

Audio is now completely untenable. Problem was fixable in 6.0 when it cropped up (by turning sound off/on for me). Now, sound is complete garbage as soon as skills start being used. Doesn't matter if it's level 80+ SGE running dungeon roulettes or a level 4 LNC using only True Thrust/Vorpal Thrust. Sounds like someone running rocks in a blender.

When combat is over, issues persist. BGM and ambient sounds chop and stutter. Dialogue is completely broken and unintelligible.

Reporting it again, sadly this patch did nothing to improve the stuttering for me. I recorded an example of it here https://youtu.be/5vC6ZYRGV28?t=52

I have had my own audio issue that I don't know if other have as well
I have not encountered any of the issues with skill sound fx
I have however had popping sounds and random audio stutter of the sound you get when in a crowded area,
it sounds as if someone is cycling through radio stations but instead, it's the crowded audio sound fx cutting in and out when not being near a big crowd of people at all
and everything I have tried to fix it did not fix it

I have pretty much the same problem everyone else adressed here already. Furthermore, I tried pretty much everything: from changing drivers, changing soundcards, changing soundoptions and even disabling some options in the BIOS, which could have some impact on the audio. Combined with my experience that I never had an issue like this... ever (in one specific game), it is safe to assume this is not fixable on my side.
The devs have to look into this asap, because the music is too important for this game not to experience.

Note: DX9 does help me getting rid of the audio issue (for the most part) but the game runs worse, looks worse... so there is that.

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Originally Posted by GorthRedsteel

Still fucked... unlucky.
I guess we have to stop being poor, and JUST buy better PCs. :)

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Good luck. With the semiconductor shortage, parts for computers are 3x to 6x what they were in cost a year or two ago. What's being sold as "gaming PCs" on Amazon for ~$1k are the same models that were different bargain series ~$600 when I was shopping for a friend in 2019. The one I wound up buying for her was $1003 in 2019. Now, a comparable model is $2719. Even the GeForce 1070 Ti that I bought for $289 on Amazon doesn't sell for less than $700 these days.

With luck, Squeenix will simply add in an option to enable pre-Endwalker Legacy sound.

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Still fucked... unlucky.
I guess we have to stop being poor, and JUST buy better PCs.

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I just ran the endwalker benchmark today out of curiosity and my PC got a 6k score, which places it on the higher end of stardand, so I should have no problems at all. There is simply no justification for me to replace hardware that's completely fine for the sake of a single game.

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Originally Posted by Lagunow

I just ran the endwalker benchmark today out of curiosity and my PC got a 6k score, which places it on the higher end of stardand, so I should have no problems at all. There is simply no justification for me to replace hardware that's completely fine for the sake of a single game.

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I decided to give this a try as well.
Set it up to what I use "High (Laptop)" and my score was at 9.1k

Does anyone know if the JP playerbase has the audio stutter issue? We can beg and seethe in our English forum echo chamber all we want - if the JP playerbase hasn't reported the problem, it will remain unknown to the devs.

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Originally Posted by TorusTor

Does anyone know if the JP playerbase has the audio stutter issue? We can beg and seethe in our English forum echo chamber all we want - if the JP playerbase hasn't reported the problem, it will remain unknown to the devs.

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They have. One of the posts about this links to over 50 forum posts on the English, German, and Japanese forums about this issue, as well as Reddit posts.

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Originally Posted by TorusTor

Does anyone know if the JP playerbase has the audio stutter issue? We can beg and seethe in our English forum echo chamber all we want - if the JP playerbase hasn't reported the problem, it will remain unknown to the devs.

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I have linked in the first post of the following thread some posts from the Japanese forums reporting this issue:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/451573

Japanese players seem to be complaining much less than we are though.

But I think that considering how big the English speaking community is in this game, I assume SE have some concern for our issues, and that ours demands will reach them eventually, although the language barrier is probably indeed an problem in this case.

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Originally Posted by minopoki

I have linked in the first post of the following thread some posts from the Japanese forums reporting this issue:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/451573

Japanese players seem to be complaining much less than we are though.

But I think that considering how big the English speaking community is in this game, I assume SE have some concern for our issues, and that ours demands will reach them eventually, although the language barrier is probably indeed an problem in this case.

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There's a single thread and 70% of the replies are by the same person. I do not understand japanese, but it seems the JP community is largely unaffected, which is worrying given SE's track record of poor communication with the western playerbase.

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Originally Posted by Lagunow

There's a single thread and 70% of the replies are by the same person. I do not understand japanese, but it seems the JP community is largely unaffected, which is worrying given SE's track record of poor communication with the western playerbase.

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There isn't only one.
From my limited Japanese knowledge, I could find at about 6 threads that seemed to me were reporting specifically the audio stuttering issue, and I linked all of them in the other thread.

This one is the only one I have found from after 6.01.
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...85%A5%E3%82%8B

Title translates to: "Even after Patch 6.01, sound noise is happening"
The first part translates to:
"Since Endwalker early access, it has been happening, and it was said that was gonna be fixed in 6.01, but…
With no change, noise or crackling/clipping are happening."

パッチ6.01以降もサウンドにノイズが入る
暁月アーリーから発生していて、6.01で修正されたという話でしたが
変わらずノイズ・音割れが発生しています。

One other thing to consider, too, is that a far, far larger percentage of the Japanese player base play on consoles. PC gaming isn't as prevalent in Japan as it is in the Americas and EU.

Didn't read through all 36 pages, but throwing in my voice that I'm also having this issue. I have also tried all suggestions short of complete reinstall of the game. At first it was in most combat and especially when a large number of enemies were present. After 6.01 now I'm getting the stuttering moving around or even just standing idle. No associated performance issues outside audio stuttering and slowing.

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Originally Posted by TorusTor

Does anyone know if the JP playerbase has the audio stutter issue? We can beg and seethe in our English forum echo chamber all we want - if the JP playerbase hasn't reported the problem, it will remain unknown to the devs.

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Okay, I have done it!
I tried posting a thread in Japanese in the Lodestone Japanese Forums describing what we have been suffering, and what are our requests.
It's poorly poorly poorly written, but I think it's understandable.

Here's the link, I might translate it to English later, if you guys want.
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...の音割れをひどく受けています

I hope we see some action now.

When Endwalker released, I experienced audio stuttering, lagging, popping for the first time. It would happen during the occasional large FATE.

After patch 6.01, the Asphodel raid fight #4 was unplayable with sound on. It sounded as if things were echoing and looping over each other, while slowed down and lagging. It was horrendous.

Estate housing music is fine, but upon entering my inn room, audio lagging, stuttering, etc. ensued.

Really disappointed that the patch not only failed to fix this issue, but appears to have made it worse.

I have tried changing all my sound settings, changing equaliser settings, changing audio output device (wired speaker, headset, etc), I have tried changing listening position. Even with only "voice" on in the Asphodel #4 raid fight, the audio issue persisted.

I really hope they can resolve this. Playing the game without sound for seemingly random encounters and instances is so disheartening.

Sound in Radz-At-Han? Estate? Ashpodel #1? Perfect, beautiful, no issues.

My apartment? Asphodel #4? Whoa buddy! This is what the game would sound like on dial-up and underwater. Oof. It is so random.

I have had my first play session without audio popping and stuttering since installing the game last week and I'm sharing what I did in hopes it helps someone else. What I was experiencing was only present after fully logging in but otherwise CONSTANT popping and stuttering which sounded just like the example in the first post of this thread, (but without end) and it would get worse even if I just targeted the door in my inn room.

The suggestion by SE to reduce sample rates and such on sound devices did NOT work, but it got me into googling for ideas on how to optimize my PC's sound. The below is cobbled from a few different guides on audio optimization. I hope it helps some others out and that the fix wasn't temporary on my end.

1. I'm currently playing in DX9 mode. Not sure if that matters but I wasn't about to log out and wait in the queue to test once I got it working tonight. I will test DX11 mode tomorrow. (It also works in DX9 so this is probably unnecessary)

2. Set processor scheduling to "Background services"

• In Control Panel select "System"
• Go to "Advanced system settings" and then the "Advanced" tab
• Click on "Settings.." under Performance to bring up the "Performance Options" window.
• Go to the "Advanced" tab and set processor scheduling as "Background Services"
• Click "Apply" then "OK"

3. High-Performance CUSTOM Power Plan (I was in Power Save settings prior to this)

• Open Control Panel and search for ‘Power Options'
• In the menu on the left, select ‘Create a power plan’.
• Select ‘High Performance’
• Give your plan a name: For example, ‘Audio Workstation’.
• Select ‘Never’ for both ‘Turn off the display’ and ‘Put the computer to sleep’
• Select ‘Create’
• You will now be on the Power Options page where your NEW custom power plan will be selected.
• Select 'Change Plan Settings' for your NEW custom power plan
• Open ‘Advanced power settings
• Expand ‘USB settings’
• Disable ‘USB Selective suspend’

4. While running FFXIV, change priority to high in Task Manager.

• Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc to start Task Manager.
• Go to the Details tab, right-click the desired process, and choose Set priority and select any value that you want.
• When the confirmation dialog appears, select Change priority.

This also came with the added bonus of fixing what my FC homies were referring to as "taco bell drive through mic" on my end. Go figure.

FWIW I am running a nearly 12 year old Gateway FX 6860 with Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU, 8gb RAM, and upgraded to SDD + Refurbished: MSI Radeon RX 570. (So I should be able to run DX11).

Good luck folks. SE needs to put out some better guidance on fixing this issue than what they have provided so far. Reducing sample rates does nothing.

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Originally Posted by Resheph

I have had my first play session without audio popping and stuttering since installing the game last week and I'm sharing what I did in hopes it helps someone else. What I was experiencing was only present after fully logging in but otherwise CONSTANT popping and stuttering which sounded just like the example in the first post of this thread, (but without end) and it would get worse even if I just targeted the door in my inn room.

The suggestion by SE to reduce sample rates and such on sound devices did NOT work, but it got me into googling for ideas on how to optimize my PC's sound. The below is cobbled from a few different guides on audio optimization. I hope it helps some others out and that the fix wasn't temporary on my end.

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Just tried that on DX11, didn't change a thing for me...
About to try DX9, then I'll update this.

EDIT:
Just tried DX9, and it seems better, but not solved completely. I could fight some FATEs, and not problem at all, but faced some stuttering when entering an inn.
The thing is usually this problem tend to worse the more time I play, so it doesn't look very promising in my case, I don't think I feel safe to continue MSQ and watch voiced cutscenes when there's still risk to the voices to be cut...
But thanks to the suggestion, Resheph.

Maybe if we combine this fix with other fixes previously suggested, we might me able to get it even better, but in the end, this is still an issue for SE to fix.


EDIT AGAIN:
Just as I wrote the above edit and went back to the game, the problem became bad again...

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Originally Posted by Resheph

/snip

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I wanted to say that this helped, and it might for those who are having issues with older hardware. But it seems that most of the people having an issue are running AMD FX-series cpu's, which is something interfering with the fancy new sound engine designed for the "Immerse Spatial Audio" doodad that they want you to buy.

It has been reported by intel users as well, I wish people would stop saying it's an AMD thing. Even i7 has had it. I don't know why they're reported less, but it's not only AMD.

(And not only realtek, which some of us were previously suspecting. Sound blaster has also had it, and somebody tried buying a new sound card and had no luck.)

Edit: I tried disabling the "USB selective suspend" thing in power options, it also didn't fix it. DX9 makes it partially better but not fixed. Camera angle can definitely affect it (sometimes there's no good angle though).

I've thrown everything I could think of at this, and nothing at all got rid of it. Some things certainly made the problem worse, but the best I managed to do was increase my FPS by around 50% (from ~100 FPS to ~150 FPS at least in the inn room, which is pretty cool, but did nothing for the sound issues).

I'll try to not go into too much detail, but here's the gist of what I tried (not in this order):

• Changing power settings (including the stuff from the Resheph's post)
• Disabling all Realtek hardware at the BIOS level that I could (both sound and ethernet in this case). I used a wifi card already installed to connect to the internet (I normally use the ethernet), and used a usb-based headset that counts as an external sound card for sound.
• Changing task priorities of both FFXIV and sound-related background services to both high and real time.
• Updated GPU driver.
• Updated Windows 10.
• Updated BIOS (I very strongly do not recommend anyone attempting this unless you're comfortable with messing with such settings. This reset some of my settings which made my desktop unbootable for a bit until I could restore the correct settings for my RAM).
• Switching from the Realtek HD Audio driver to the generic Windows one.
• Changing the sampling rate as officially recommended.
• Disabled virtual memory
• Changing vsync settings
• Changing refresh rate settings in game (setting it all the way down to 15 FPS mitigates it the most, but it's still there)
• Changing the listening position (though I recall this certainly making more of a difference before 6.01, it didn't seem to do much tonight)
• Disabled CPU throttling
• Reducing graphics quality (I normally run maximum or something very much like it, but I tested the standard laptop settings and noticed no real change other than the obvious leap in FPS)
• Using the DX9 client
• Disabling unused audio hardware (optical/digital audio ports and the GPU's audio driver that supports audio over the HDMI ports since I normally use analog speakers/headset)

I made some observations during my attempts:

• While stuttering seemed to happen in conjunction with FPS drops, after some of my earliest changes, the FPS drops no longer correlated with sound issues. I'd hear stuttering, but the system window would show FPS of >90 easily.
• For kicks, I re-ran the EW benchmark set to 1920x1080 Maximum and scored 8339 (High), which isn't bad for non-OC'd AMD FX-4100 (3.61Ghz) + GTX 1070ti combo. This certainly isn't a case of not meeting minimum specs for this game even after the update. (also, the benchmark had absolutely no audio issues)
• If the game was horribly stuttering and I logged out to the start screen, the start screen itself would stutter horribly all the way through choosing a character and waiting in queue. It's like it gets bogged down by something in game and likewise something in game will fix it from time to time, but the start/login screen seems incapable of impacting it.
• Even during the worst stuttering, all other applications (if I was running them concurrently during various tests) would sound perfectly normal. For instance, I was frequently carrying on a conversation over Discord with my wife during certain tests. I never heard any stuttering from the voice chat while the game stuttered away. I also tested playing some audio files which sounded perfectly fine, again even with stuttering from the game in the background.
• I even monitored CPU/GPU temperatures during some tests where I really played around with the in-game frame limit to switch between high/low frame rates while angling my camera such that stutter happened constantly and no matter the frame rate. I couldn't find any correlation between temperature and stuttering (just in case there was some hard throttling happening due to potentially exceeding thermal limits). I could get my system fairly hot, but not exceed the maximum operating temperatures, and clock rates remained at their expected values even at the highest temperatures I could manage to reach.

And for those hung up on "it's gotta be outdated/old hardware", here's a head scratcher: My wife runs a system with an AMD Phenom II X4 CPU and an even older GPU (iirc, a GTX 970, but I'd have to check to be sure). She hasn't had any sound issues at all even after 6.0's launch. As the usb-based headset belongs to her, she's even swapped between it and her speakers even with the game running (which, as I recall, used to cause sound to die completely before).

At this point, I've considered getting a discrete sound card to add to my system, but after testing the USB headset, that seems like it'd have no benefit as far as this particular issue goes. It's clear SE has made some change to the client that's causing this, and it's not because older/slower systems are suddenly bottlenecking on the latest graphics updates that came with 6.0, especially since any other audio will continue to play just fine alongside the stuttering game. What makes it illusive is that it seems to only happen to a specific set of hardware, not necessarily "older than X", like a problem with a specific CPU architecture.

For reference, my system:

• Motherboard: Asus M5A97
• CPU: AMD FX-4100 Quad-Core (3.61 Ghz)
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti
• RAM: 16.0GB DDR3 (1866 Mhz)

Edit: I just pulled the specs from my wife's system (remember, audio works perfectly for this one):

• Motherboard: msi 970A-G43
• CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 965 (3.40 Ghz)
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960
• RAM: 8.0GB DDR3 (1333 Mhz)

I also ran the benchmark on her system at 1600x900 Maximum and it scored 6049 (Fairly High).

Kudos for everyone going all the way with trying everything to find a solution the user can use to fix the issue.

I'm sincerly in the believe now that it's nothing we can change, we have to wait for a reaction on SE's part.

I just wish I didn't, for the first time, buy a 3 Month sub in anticipation of EW...

Oh yeah, this issue is really getting under my skin now.

The fact that they released a patch yesterday addressing sound problems but we still see lots and lots of posts from ppl having this issue (myself included) worries me.

Just like all the new trials, the raid fights have been bad on the sound bug, in particular the last fight which is so bad i can barely struggle to play it without sound completly desabled.

Its a massive bummer for me! I really enjoy the fights and music.