Experiencing unusual animation/audio lag.

I have no idea whether this is a connection issue or something hardware related on my end, but I've noticed lately that when performing actions, sometimes the visual effects, animations, and/or sound will be delayed by a second or two, assuming they even play out at all.

Mounting up occasionally results in me becoming invisible for a few to several seconds before my mount actually appears, but the effects of the mounting (increased and flight) come into play immediately.

I'm suspecting it may be the latter as I've suddenly started getting random frame drops in areas where I previously had been getting a smooth 60 FPS.

The thing is I have no idea whether it's the GPU, CPU or something else that would be causing this problem.

Well, now I can't even get the game to start up properly now, so there seems to potentially be some kind of SSD corruption issue.

I am not using Steam, however, so I cannot do a file check to see if there's something wrong in that regard.

EDIT: It turns out something was basically eating up ALL of my SSD's resources (It was constantly sitting at 100% according to the task manager even when XIV wasn't running), meaning it was getting so overloaded that it couldn't run or even start XIV properly. A simple restart of the computer has resolved things for now and all of the aforementioned issues are gone for the time being.

So lesson learned, if you're getting weird audio/animation hiccups but not seeing any actual delay in the effects of skills going off, it likely means there's an issue with your computer's data storage.

Good morning and thank you for posting on the Final Fantasy XIV Technical Support Forums.

Thank you for keeping us updated. We will be moving this thread to "Closed Concerns".

Good luck with your adventures through Eorzea!