Audio popping issue

[Elliah-Seraheart]

Hello, everyone.

Thank you very much for your feedback concerning audio issues you’ve been experiencing.

We understand that these issues have persisted for players after Patch 6.01. In order for us to get a better understanding of the cases that have yet to be resolved, we’d like to ask for those affected to try the following:

• Because resource requirements and other factors gradually increase with each update, reducing CPU performance load may improve the situation.
  
  • Reduce the number of characters and objects displayed through System Configuration > Other Settings > Character and Object Display, or change the Graphics Settings to Standard.
• Close any applications that are running in the background.
  
• For Windows users, open the Sound Control Panel, right-click your default device in the Playback tab and open Properties, then under the Advanced tab, configure the Default Format to a lower setting.

If the previous steps do not improve the situation, we ask that you confirm the following to help determine the issue and distinguish whether it is system-related.

• Does the problem still occur after disabling the DirectX 11 Support option in the launcher settings?
  
• For gamepad users, does the problem still persist after disconnecting or changing your gamepad device?

If the steps above do not resolve your situation, we ask that you create a post in the Bug Report section using the bug report template, along with your system information and the steps taken to troubleshoot. This will assist our support team when they gather the information to share with the development team for review and investigation.

We sincerely apologize for the frustration this has caused and appreciate your understanding.

Hi. I've just send in an official bug report through the ingame feature - but I want to reinforce that these issues ARE NOT RELATED to CPU workload, FPS or heat for me. I, like many others here am using an FX8320. BUT I do not have any problems with the workload. In fact, I'm just about the only one here who's issues have been gradually getting better since 6.0.

There MAY BE increased workload to be done by the CPU in Endwalker- BUT it's not THE CAUSE of the audio issues experienced by most people here, I'm pretty sure. At least NOT THE ONLY CAUSE.

I made a video here demonstrating very clearly WHAT the issues is in 6.01, that it is ABSOLUTELY unrelated to FPS/CPU workload, and that it's VERY MUCH related to the ambient channel.
https://youtu.be/gYGu2rv3gbg?t=307

Heck, I made another video just to prove that it's NOT CPU STRAIN that is causing audio issues. If anything, it's the audio issues that are taxing the hardware. Not the other way around. And the only strain I experience is NOT on my much weaker, old FX 8320 CPU, but on my 2019, now like 800$ Nvidia GTX 1070 Ti. Though I suspect this is THE RESULT of the audio issues, not THE CAUSE. Even if it WAS the cause, it really shouldnt be on a 1070 Ti.
https://youtu.be/fX5gt0Dhwd4

Here's a demonstration done in 6.0 where it's very clear, that the original issues were very much related to camera position, and absolutely unrelated to FPS/CPU Workload.
https://youtu.be/sLQW6ShIkJY

CPU: AMD FX 8320
GPU Nvidia 1070 Ti (30.0.14.9709)
RAM: 32 GB RAM DDR3
Motherboard: ASRock 970 Pro3 V2.0
Stereo Headphones 41k Hz 16 Bit (Lowest setting!. All effects disabled - no but also happens on much lower settings on other headphones)
Realtek High Definition Audio 6.0.9132.1
Windows 10 Pro 64 bit (10.0.19042)

[MiaShino]

It took much time to find simple way of stating this.. maahhh things make so much sense in the mind yet when you attempt putting them to words everything goes fooey.

This audio stuttering issue reminds me of the type of issues experienced during HLE audio emulation on console emulators. It seems Square could be struggling to schedule audio processing requests across multiple cpu cores if any slowdown in the pipeline occurs. This results in the audio engine waiting to process new requests which as you hear causes stuttering effect. This would be especially prominent on FX cpus because of unique nature of core configuration.

Example time! On Bulldozer (FX series) cpu cores do not have dedicated floating point units opting instead to share one across two cores. They are much much of the worse at certain calculations especially ones requiring these floating point units. Vector calculations were and still are quite difficult to work with and as spatial audio requires many of these to be made..

You cannot rely on cpu utilization either. You may see something close to 40% utilization and wonder; but the cpu is not at 100% so I have additional headroom! You may in fact not. If something has stalled thus starving those cpu cores of something to process it will not be processing anything so will read as "not fully saturated". Even worse for FX because if that shared floating point unit is busy doing something then both cpu cores sharing it must also wait.

I may have the number of FP units per core cluster wrong so many apologies again. I hated working with bulldozer and do not do much difficult software development anymore (because it causes insanity..).

Square must 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.

For any suffering from this issue who also attempt thousands of erroneous solutions, I would not waste too much time doing this. I.. just.. cannot believe a major developer would make drastic overhaul to their sound engine without seemingly properly testing it across multiple hardware configurations. At the least they should have implemented a legacy fall back should unforeseen problems arise allowing users to temporarily roll back to working solution until problem is resolved. Then I find out they charge for the sound pack that created the issue in first place, seriously? Who does this?

Myself and friends are not encountering the issue yet on older hardware (i7 4790K and Amd Phenom x4).

Edit time! The PS3 cell micro architecture suffered from similar issues when attempting to make those pesky spes do anything because you had to wait for the ppe. It was unholy nightmare for many.

[Maeklos]

Square must 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.

Or, just reinstate the sound engine from Shadowbringers and allow that as an optional choice.

[GorthRedsteel]

It took much time to find simple way of stating this.. maahhh things make so much sense in the mind yet when you attempt putting them to words everything goes fooey.

This audio stuttering issue reminds me of the type of issues experienced during HLE audio emulation on console emulators. It seems Square could be struggling to schedule audio processing requests across multiple cpu cores if any slowdown in the pipeline occurs. This results in the audio engine waiting to process new requests which as you hear causes stuttering effect. This would be especially prominent on FX cpus because of unique nature of core configuration.

Example time! On Bulldozer (FX series) cpu cores do not have dedicated floating point units opting instead to share one across two cores. They are much much of the worse at certain calculations especially ones requiring these floating point units. Vector calculations were and still are quite difficult to work with and as spatial audio requires many of these to be made..

You cannot rely on cpu utilization either. You may see something close to 40% utilization and wonder; but the cpu is not at 100% so I have additional headroom! You may in fact not. If something has stalled thus starving those cpu cores of something to process it will not be processing anything so will read as "not fully saturated". Even worse for FX because if that shared floating point unit is busy doing something then both cpu cores sharing it must also wait.

I may have the number of FP units per core cluster wrong so many apologies again. I hated working with bulldozer and do not do much difficult software development anymore (because it causes insanity..).

Square must 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.

For any suffering from this issue who also attempt thousands of erroneous solutions, I would not waste too much time doing this. I.. just.. cannot believe a major developer would make drastic overhaul to their sound engine without seemingly properly testing it across multiple hardware configurations. At the least they should have implemented a legacy fall back should unforeseen problems arise allowing users to temporarily roll back to working solution until problem is resolved. Then I find out they charge for the sound pack that created the issue in first place, seriously? Who does this?

Myself and friends are not encountering the issue yet on older hardware (i7 4790K and Amd Phenom x4).

Edit time! The PS3 cell micro architecture suffered from similar issues when attempting to make those pesky spes do anything because you had to wait for the ppe. It was unholy nightmare for many.

Thanks mate for a great explanation! You actually know what you are talking about which makes it a pleasure to read. Now, if only Sicycre could get this post translated and send to the devs, then perhaps we could get a fix out before the end of Endwalker. lol

[MiaShino]

Thanks mate for a great explanation! You actually know what you are talking about which makes it a pleasure to read. Now, if only Sicycre could get this post translated and send to the devs, then perhaps we could get a fix out before the end of Endwalker. lol

Aww many thanks! The at the times crippling imposter syndrome makes me believe otherwise.. Am rusty but all the mention of FX cpus brought back horrible memories of that hot mess of architecture.

If anyone is still curious out there and experiencing problems using the newer Ryzen I have umm, unfortunate news because Ryzen suffers from own unique problem.

Anyone working with Linux or Windows schedulers may know what I am speaking of, it has to do with communicating between core clusters across that "infinity fabric". Optimally you will wish to avoid communicating between primary and secondary blocks of core clusters with there being four cores per main cluster and eight per secondary cluster. Any communication between secondary clusters can suffer from bandwidth constraints.

I should hope they were aware of these things when consulting third party to slap one new audio engine together. You should not do this, save sweeping changes for later patches. If they were somehow not, may it help!

[Maeklos]

I should hope they were aware of these things when consulting third party to slap one new audio engine together. You should not do this, save sweeping changes for later patches. If they were somehow not, may it help!

You know, if they tore apart their testing servers in order to bolster the login servers to help combat the 2002 errors, that would explain why they weren't able to do as thorough of testing on 6.01 as might have otherwise been the case. Especially since they thought that 6.01 would fix the problems introduced in 6.0, only to have them cascade tenfold.

[MiaShino]

You know, if they tore apart their testing servers in order to bolster the login servers to help combat the 2002 errors, that would explain why they weren't able to do as thorough of testing on 6.01 as might have otherwise been the case. Especially since they thought that 6.01 would fix the problems introduced in 6.0, only to have them cascade tenfold.

You would never perform these types of tests upon server hardware though, that is for the dedicated Q&A team. Said team should have dedicated client machines comprised of some range of hardware configurations. The best way to set this up is to gather metrics from your users in same way Steam regularly does via hardware surveys. Some of their programming decisions doth boggle the mind.. like the fifteen minute disconnect that was recently patched.

[Nonoliri]

Note: If someone else want to try this, would be appreciated. More people would give a better overwiev.

I tried this out too, using the Virtual Audio Cable and Voicemeeter. It seemed to help initially, but once I got into a dungeon it came back. Thankfully it seemed to kind of 'fix' itself once I got out of combat again, which it didn't used to do without the VAC, but it's still definitely a temporary band-aid that required installing two different drivers/programs and restarting my system and learning how to set it up just to mitigate some of the problem. The echo did seem to go away during some cutscenes, but really only the ones I watched in The Unending Journey. I didn't want to try and see a new one because, you know, it kind of ruins the story and atmosphere to have to listen to that choppy, echo-y audio. I might suck it up and sacrifice another cutscene to the Noise to test it tomorrow though.

I'm also going to try turning down my graphical settings I guess? Though I never had them super high to begin with. And unplugging my gamepad (which I can't play without, since playing NIN on m+kb destroyed my wrists and made me swap to a gamepad in the first place,) but I really hope that information will be used to determine what needs to be fixed on SE's end, not given as a solution if it manages to solve the problem for some people. My biggest fear right now is just that SE did something with Endwalker that ultimately is out of my control without me having to spend plenty of money to fix, and that the problem's going to be marked as "resolved" and I essentially won't be able to play. Nothing in the benchmark made me think there would be this kind of issues, while my computer is a bit older it's still above minimum settings, and the fact that this issue is happening to so many people including people on consoles and on much better machines than me really makes me think it's not an issue I'm able to fix on my end.

If lowering my graphics settings and unplugging my controller and swapping to DX9 and lowering my sound bitrate and Hz and changing my camera listening position all somehow solve the issue... that isn't actually a fix. If that information is sent to the development team and used to make an actual fix that gets patched in, that's great and I'm all for it. But if the solution SE has is to tell people to try things and see what works, and presents that as the entire solution then it's no solution at all.

[AluneTempest]

I wonder how long they will take to fix this problem.
I've already canceled my sub and i'm already prepared to just move on and go play something else, even though this game has been a blessing in my life for having greatly improved my mental health in this terrible last year that i had.

My last hope is this problem be fixed in the patch in January.

[Teiren]

I realize now the most likely scenario: Perhaps Endwalker-specific content was designed only for this new, poor sound engine, and so some stuff can't work on the old, better sound engine for whatever reasons, thus they actually can't go back to 5.5 sound engine even as a personal option. What an utter nightmare. Still, they could at LEAST just revert back to 6.0, seeing how 6.0.1 only made it worse.