Ingame Sound/Music extrem stuttering in battles

[Triple-D]

I've also tried every suggested "fix" with no success. Frustrating when voiced cut scenes stutter and dialog cuts off.....distracting to rotation flow during dungeons....open world stutters in random place....even alone in Inn rooms it stutters. Re-ran the Endwalker Benchmark with a "High" rating, and no frame rate or audio issues. Everything was fine until the 6.0 patch.

I know the Devs have a lot on the go right now, and Early Access is when they iron out as many bugs as possible before official release, just hope they're seeing these threads.

PS... THANK YOU DEVS.... we love what you do.

UPDATE: As proposed in a thread elsewhere, I attempted to install EMBODY'S Immerse Audio Gamepack Trial. Although this seemed at first to finally fix the issue, my PC blue screened in the middle of the first Voiced Cut scene after the install. I have no definitive proof yet that the plugin caused the crash, as I'm now in a 5.5K World Login Queue, but I find the timing very suspicious. More updates to come.

UPDATE 2: Installing the Spacial Sound plugin did not fix the audio stutters.

UPDATE 3: Last night, prior to the maintenance shutdown, I was still searching for a fix to the audio issue. In an unrelated to FFXIV Thread, I found some posts about similar issues with other gaming systems. The issue in those cases seemed to be CPU Throttling. After monitoring my CPU and GPU usage during game play, I concluded that the similarities were striking. It appeared that the poor optimization of the FFXIV software was causing higher than normal CPU use, and overheating the CPU, causing throttling issues as it attempted to shed excess heat. I increased the fan speed cut-off settings, and the more stable heat distribution almost IMMEDIATELY solved the stuttering issue. I know the Devs were looking into reports of audio issues and had plans to implement fixes with a future patch(not sure if that was included in last nights maintenance patch) so, hopefully if my discoveries don't help you, the Dev's hotfixes will.

[Tessmarin]

Okay I am leaving this to confirm I am having the same issues.
I started out on Win7 because I hate Win10 and I dragged it out as long as I could so if people think this is a Win10 issue it is not. I spent my first two days of Endwalker moving to Win10 because every combat was putting my brain into a sound blender.

To be honest my sound issues started out mild a few months before release but it was sounds crashing into each other then my system would stagger - it started at the Shearing fete in the Firmament for me. Gradually it would get worse and in some cases my system would break and static would take over my headphones at max volume until I rebooted the entire machine.

I did notice that this occurred when Razer (mouse) would do an update but I think most people are not using Razer mice - many seem to be using Logitech - but I am noting that in case its a factor. This may or may not be related.

After release ALL combat sounds are now shattered, it sounds like glass breaking. The more people or monsters involved the worse it is. Two days of troubleshooting every sound setting with a 3k que to login to test has been a special kind of hell.

Windows 10 the sounds were slightly improved but not by much. I tried 5.1, 7.1 I tried all the settings people suggested and no dice. Tried in both Win10 and Win7. And fwiw you cant turn off the center sound without losing cut scene dialog either btw.

I tried both DX9 and DX11 and both went bad on the sound. I have tried plug in headsets, USB headset and Wireless headsets and all went bad on the sound.

I have now downloaded THX Spacial so I can switch sound settings without having to sit in a nightmare que every time. That is my next step.

I want to note I did have Realtek drivers. Many mentioned that so I want to confirm that. Now I will try this again with the THX driver that comes from Razer and see if it helps. I am also going to try Cortex to see if performance boost helps at all.

One last thing to note - right after the fresh Win10 install my sound was good until I went to Limsa then it degraded at a rapid rate back to breaking glass sounds. I am now running the background music and combat sounds at barely audible levels just to get by. Cut scenes are slightly choppy but ok.


***Update as of 12/6/21***
- Downloaded/Purchased THX Spatial (Razer) so I can change sounds in game without having to restart FF.
- Picked up an (nearly impossible to find in store) USB SoundCard from my local computer repair store. SoundBlaster Play 3
- Set my jack headphones into the USB, Set THX to recognize the USB as my driver, FF sees THX as the source)
- Under Sounds
- THX is set to 16 bit 48000 DVD (I tried CD 44.1 didnt do anything to fix this). Enable Enhancements if OFF, Spacial Sound is OFF, Configure Speakers is set to Stereo
- USB is set to Disable all Enhancements, Set to 24 bit 48000 hz Studio Quality, Spacial Sound is OFF, Configure Speakers is set to Stereo
- I tested on normal speakers and headphones and both have the broken glass sounding combat, stagger and popping. I put it back to headphones pretty quickly to avoid the rest of my household rising up in rage.
- Updated my Nvidia (apparently the windows latest was garbage and Nvidia did a new one for 12/1 so folks should check their drivers again)
- Tried disabling the Nvidia sound drivers - which did nothing but make the quality a little worse)
- DirectX9 still is also bad.
- Originally my Win7 setup had RealTek but the new Win10 download set me to High Definition Audio Device by default. Running HDAD last night lost my cutscene audio so I swapped back to the USB sound card driver. The USB sound card driver however is way worse on sound crackling. The key setting to get my cutscene audio back seemed to be changing the drivers to Stereo.

If folks want to try to swap out their defaults without having to reload into that 2+ hour que to test the THX program so far has been a godsend and worth the 21 bucks for my sanity thus far. There are probably free options out there I just don't know what those are at the moment and I was too exhausted from testing all this to go digging into that too.

The setup above is the best I have been able to get it so far but combat is still a train wreck. I am running most sounds at like 10-15 volume. Pretty sad about this experience so far.

I realize this is an FF issue most likely but its odd that some people have no issues - which means there has to be a common denominator for the affected people. There definitely seems to be a tie with camera facing and objects the sound is bouncing off of. Setting my camera to 100 on player definitely toned it down a decent amount so make sure to change that setting. For now I am trying to get the most tolerable setup I can while we wait for a fix hopefully soon.




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[Corvus_V]

I've also tried every suggested "fix" with no success. Frustrating when voiced cut scenes stutter and dialog cuts off.....distracting to rotation flow during dungeons....open world stutters in random place....even alone in Inn rooms it stutters. Re-ran the Endwalker Benchmark with a "High" rating, and no frame rate or audio issues. Everything was fine until the 6.0 patch.

I know the Devs have a lot on the go right now, and Early Access is when they iron out as many bugs as possible before official release, just hope they're seeing these threads.

PS... THANK YOU DEVS.... we love what you do.

UPDATE: As proposed in a thread elsewhere, I attempted to install EMBODY'S Immerse Audio Gamepack Trial. Although this seemed at first to finally fix the issue, my PC blue screened in the middle of the first Voiced Cut scene after the install. I have no definitive proof yet that the plugin caused the crash, as I'm now in a 5.5K World Login Queue, but I find the timing very suspicious. More updates to come.

UPDATE 2: Installing the Spacial Sound plugin did not fix the audio stutters.

Have you tried this? It seemed to work for my girlfriend. Although, switching to DirectX9 fixed her problem, it made her game unstable and crashy, which exacerbated queue grief. So this is certainly worth a shot. Let me know. If it does work, spread the word of it as a potential fix.

[Wyvrex]

Just adding my two cents here - I suffer the same issue (wired headset). No problems in 6 years of playing and only since EW dropped. Also only in combat, for the most part. I did see that Soken had acknowledged the issue on twitter:
https://twitter.com/SOKENsquareenix/...20178749845504

So hopefully a fix can be found. My husband hasn't had this issue and his PC is a little newer than mine, but hardly top of the range and still old. After seeing so many people have had this issue, I think hardware is playing only a small part, if at all. They need to fix something on their end by the looks of it, otherwise someone would have found a fix and no matter where I've read, there hasn't been one, just stuff that makes it less bad for those experiencing worse sound issues than I am.

My workaround has been to just take my headset off during combat lol! Music is fine the rest of the time with only a minor hiccup here or there. Does mean i'm missing the good tunes, but I am considering muting the game and finding the trial/dungeon music on youtube so I can enjoy it while fighting...but I've not tried that yet! When I reach the next dungeon I will.

[Grashopa]

Just to share my experience. I was also having sound issues in combat. As suggested by someone else, I went into sound settings and saw that my equalizer was already set to standard. I changed it away from standard and the issue went away. I returned it to standard and the issue stayed away.

[lemonsquizle]

Just commenting on here to help this thread get attention! I get the same awful stutters in my audio during combat. It pretty much makes combat unplayable with sound on. It feels odd because it seems like the game should be frame-lagging from how it sounds in the audio but my fps stays pretty consistent during the stutters. Ive tried changing the audio frequency in windows, DX9, camera distance settings. Nothing has worked yet. It's been happening since Endwalker came out for me. Hope the developers can fix it because I really love this game!

[Nisava]

Same issue here, 6.01 fixed absolutely nothing for me. Got an email back for my support ticket and they copy + pasted everything I literally said I'd already tried. I just want to play the game I paid for, and enjoy the work the team put into their vision. Straight up disrespectful to do them and us like this.