Audio popping issue

[imabooterfly]

Once again the response is "Your CPU must not be good enough to run this game" which is complete BS and shows a lot of ignorance on the matter. Really souring my attitude towards this game which is a shame because I absolutely love Endwalker. Though I've been one of the few who have actually been able to PLAY the damn thing in spite of this gross bug. That's only because it doesn't seem to be as severe for me.

Bottom line is that the game worked flawlessly before 6.0 and the release of this new sound engine/spatial audio pack. I'd rather SQEX be honest and say "screw you, get a better CPU/buy the spatial audio pack or we're moving on without you regardless" more plainly instead of patronizing the customers with their "solutions" and things that have already been ruled out by said customers painstakingly looking into the issue themselves.

[paga]

Once again the response is "Your CPU must not be good enough to run this game" which is complete BS and shows a lot of ignorance on the matter. Really souring my attitude towards this game which is a shame because I absolutely love Endwalker. Though I've been one of the few who have actually been able to PLAY the damn thing in spite of this gross bug. That's only because it doesn't seem to be as severe for me.

Bottom line is that the game worked flawlessly before 6.0 and the release of this new sound engine/spatial audio pack. I'd rather SQEX be honest and say "screw you, get a better CPU or we're moving on without you regardless" more plainly instead of patronizing the customers with their "solutions" and things that have already been ruled out by said customers painstakingly looking into the issue themselves.

Yeah I have a Ryzen 5 5600x so its not only on old cpu. And even with spatial Audio the bug came back, at least I know to not spend more money on it..

[Grimno]

Yeah I have a Ryzen 5 5600x so its not only on old cpu. And even with spatial Audio the bug came back, at least I know to not spend more money on it..

Dang, that's only a year old.
They're over there saying "Issues with 10+ year old CPUs"
Mine's a 8320, which came out late 2012. So it's not new, but 9 years is not 10+ years.
Kind of starting to sound like they have zero clue what is the cause, and they're just saying random things as a way to "maintain communication".
Basically equivalent to a person taking you off hold to tell you they're still there, then putting you back on hold.

[paga]

Dang, that's only a year old.
They're over there saying "Issues with 10+ year old CPUs"
Mine's a 8320, which came out late 2012. So it's not new, but 9 years is not 10+ years.
Kind of starting to sound like they have zero clue what is the cause, and they're just saying random things as a way to "maintain communication".
Basically equivalent to a person taking you off hold to tell you they're still there, then putting you back on hold.

Well for me luckily it only affects ambient sound so setting that to 0 is a temporary solution but its still annoying, at least I can play the game. Just revert the game back to the old Sound engine, I actually think the game sounds worse with spatial audio.

[Nuki]

the only solution that might work is to upgrade our pc, a 9 year old system to play a game that is 11 years old.
I highly doubt we will see a fix with 6.05!! if we are lucky a patch or hotfix later.

Computer parts are so damn expensive now that its probably easier to get a ps5 to play the game

[Grimno]

Well for me luckily it only affects ambient sound so setting that to 0 is a temporary solution but its still annoying, at least I can play the game. Just revert the game back to the old Sound engine, I actually think the game sounds worse with spatial audio.

I just don't get who Spatial Audio was suppose to help. Like, how does it improve the experience?
I'm over here Googling about Spatial Audio and I see this...

"Is spatial audio better than surround sound?
It's similar since it's audio all around the viewer, but the key difference between surround sound and spatial sound is that spatial sound is reactive to the movement of the player in VR. ... Surround sound does not have that movement capability, it just plays the 5 or 7 channels around the viewer."

....Bro is Spatial Audio a VR thing? Are we being ****ed because of a VR THING!?

[Teiren]

So I said I'd post every duty that it happens in, but it's been happening regularly enough now even with Listening Position at 100 that I would go crazy if I did that. It'd now make more sense to list what duties it didn't occur in with Listening Position at 100.

And indeed, reading that quoted post was VERY interesting:

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.

I took a look at FFXIV's CPU usage when stuttering was happening (Intel i7-920, 2.67 GHz), and I noticed it would go to about 40-50, when normal usage is about 18-25. However, I wasn't getting FPS drops. So this must be what's happening for me. It also seems to happen more often around Sage actions, but then not always. Maybe Dancer too, can't really tell. One thing that I think has helped me a little is changing Battle Effects to Limited or None. This is inexplicably found in Character Configuration->Control Settings->Character tab. This is incredibly undesirable, but I can at least tolerate Limited for Party and None for Others, for now.

However, my biggest problem is that even when it's not stuttering, even if that is fixed, the audio is still wrong. All of the audio is just off, and it's not the fault of anyone's computer. It's just that the sound engine is incredibly poor and playing it all wrong. I don't know what much else to say about that. The sound engine was perfect in Shadowbringers, then plain ruined in Endwalker. I simply didn't realize it until I started doing pre-Endwalker duties again and hearing how obviously wrong it all is, such as in the Nier raids. This isn't some hard-to-grasp issue at all. You can hear it extremely easily on any computer. Even when the audio's working, it's just very obviously wrong in 6.0.

And I take back my concern that Endwalker's audio is unique to this sound engine and so they literally can't revert to 5.5. The benchmark proves that's false because it had plenty of Endwalker audio in it and it was very obviously on the same, good old sound engine that worked perfectly. So there should be absolutely no way that the 5.5 sound engine can't be provided for us, the players, in Endwalker. And if the response is that it can't be an option due to technical reasons, we will know something went very seriously wrong because the benchmark was fine.

[Nommers]

While it's frustrating to constantly be told that problems are on our end when there's 50 pages of evidence to back up the obvious fact that it's not, it's important to keep in mind that devs don't have any more time to trawl through huge forum threads than you do. Furthermore, we're dealing with a language barrier, and on top of that most of the Japanese playerbase is probably on consoles, so they likely aren't complaining nearly as much as we are. As a result of that it also wouldn't surprise me if Squeenix's in-house PC testing environment isn't nearly adequate to deal with the scale of the Western market (might explain the state of some of their other games). Point is, if you're having problems, filing an official bug report is the best thing to do. Software gets tested more in the first day after release than it does in months in development. The more people submit bug reports, the sooner we can give Squeenix an idea of what's actually going on. "I'm doing my part" and all that. Squash them bugs.

I gotta say though, the next time a shady company approaches Squeenix peddling some weird audiophile placebo-effect software that only five people are going to care about and suggest their biggest game be overhauled to accommodate it during the release of a major expansion, all the while begging for ear pics, I sincerely hope someone immediately calls security. This has been a profoundly effective advertisement against Immerse Spatial Audio and I will make sure not to have anything to do with Embody ever.

[Teiren]

Yeah, that's true. Hard to keep in mind with something so frustrating, but you're right.

[Elliah-Seraheart]

While it's frustrating to constantly be told that problems are on our end when there's 50 pages of evidence to back up the obvious fact that it's not, it's important to keep in mind that devs don't have any more time to trawl through huge forum threads than you do. Furthermore, we're dealing with a language barrier, and on top of that most of the Japanese playerbase is probably on consoles, so they likely aren't complaining nearly as much as we are. As a result of that it also wouldn't surprise me if Squeenix's in-house PC testing environment isn't nearly adequate to deal with the scale of the Western market (might explain the state of some of their other games). Point is, if you're having problems, filing an official bug report is the best thing to do. Software gets tested more in the first day after release than it does in months in development. The more people submit bug reports, the sooner we can give Squeenix an idea of what's actually going on. "I'm doing my part" and all that. Squash them bugs.

I gotta say though, the next time a shady company approaches Squeenix peddling some weird audiophile placebo-effect software that only five people are going to care about and suggest their biggest game be overhauled to accommodate it during the release of a major expansion, all the while begging for ear pics, I sincerely hope someone immediately calls security. This has been a profoundly effective advertisement against Immerse Spatial Audio and I will make sure not to have anything to do with Embody ever.

This is exactly why I feel so incredibly insulted by the replies we got in this thread. I've worked in software testing for a major company before. This was a continuous delivery app as well - like FFXIV. Any company who does anything software has people to JUST collect customer feedback and relay it to QA and Development. There's also people specifically doing "Validation", who do nothing but constantly check in with customers to see whether the product they are making is the right product for their consumers, and help inform decisions on features to come. Their observations also get relayed to QA, Development and testing and inform decisions about future patches etc.

The fact that they decided to actually implement the whole spatial audio thing is a testament to how bad their QA/Validation pipeline really is. Even if Square has the best of intentions, even if the producers and devs bring about their finest work... It doesnt make their product better, if QA/Validation/testing doesnt do their job.

This has been an ongoing issue in the AAA industry that has only gotten worse with releases in the last 2-3 years... And FF XIV has finally shown itself to suffer from the same negligent patterns. Just for clarities sake - the company I worked at had around 230k people employed and makes around 50billion dollars a year. It's not just a problem with videogames companies.

Devs may not have time to read through these threads. But there sure as hell are people who get specifically paid do do just that. And so far I have not spotted a reply from any such person. On the contrary, the reply infers that they are completely uninformed and will remain so. Because they cant bear sitting a guy down and actually "investigate".

Instead they give you the good ol "lel just buy a new iphone"