Audio popping issue

[Hiromaniac]

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.

[minopoki]

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.

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.

[DrGirlfriend]

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.

[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.

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.

[minopoki]

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.

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...

[Maeklos]

/snip

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.

[AeroXaia]

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).

[-BlueGreen-]

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).

[Jizu]

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...

[Orbek]

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.