Audio popping issue

[-BlueGreen-]

Indeed, the Phenom-series CPUs are unaffected. My wife runs a 12 year old Phenom II X4, stock settings and hasn’t had any trouble with the update. Someone some pages back talked about the architecture of the FX series and how multiple cores share the same floating point modules causing cores to potentially be bottlenecked if the tasks (like spatial audio processing) relies too heavily on floating point math.

I’m assuming the Phenom II series doesn’t have that problem. Apparently a Phenom II can be put in an AM3+ socket, so I’m tempted to pick up a Phenom II X4 or X6 and “downgrade” my CPU to work around this.

Something FX 8XXX series people might try is using motherboard settings to turn off half the cores. I tried this with my FX 4100, and while it seemed to smooth out the sound a bit, I had nowhere near enough remaining CPU bandwidth to actually run the game above single digit FPS (in fact, sometimes the sound would stutter, but the cpu was maxed at 100% at 0 FPS, meaning that 2 cores isn’t enough for the sound alone). The idea is by taking half the cores offline, the remaining cores get exclusive access to the floating point modules so that the overall pipeline no longer gets backlogged trying to schedule floating point tasks with CPU cores that are idling due to the floating point modules being maxed out.

If spatial audio with such complex processing is the future of gaming, perhaps we need advances to offload these computations to the GPU, or perhaps make some sort of audio processing module that can handle these kinds of tasks (think beefed up sound card).

[MoonstalkerZ]

If spatial audio with such complex processing is the future of gaming, perhaps we need advances to offload these computations to the GPU, or perhaps make some sort of audio processing module that can handle these kinds of tasks (think beefed up sound card).

I'm not even using the spatial audio, yet the game is apparently forcing my computer to process it anyway. I can get the option to turn off excess player models that I don't want to see to improve performance, why can't I get the option to turn off spatial audio processing that I'm not using to improve performance?

I also have the FX 4100, so it was very interesting to hear about all that from someone who seems to actually know something about how cpus work, thank you.

[Vimak-Areseia]

Indeed, the Phenom-series CPUs are unaffected. My wife runs a 12 year old Phenom II X4, stock settings and hasn’t had any trouble with the update. Someone some pages back talked about the architecture of the FX series and how multiple cores share the same floating point modules causing cores to potentially be bottlenecked if the tasks (like spatial audio processing) relies too heavily on floating point math.

I’m assuming the Phenom II series doesn’t have that problem. Apparently a Phenom II can be put in an AM3+ socket, so I’m tempted to pick up a Phenom II X4 or X6 and “downgrade” my CPU to work around this.

Something FX 8XXX series people might try is using motherboard settings to turn off half the cores. I tried this with my FX 4100, and while it seemed to smooth out the sound a bit, I had nowhere near enough remaining CPU bandwidth to actually run the game above single digit FPS (in fact, sometimes the sound would stutter, but the cpu was maxed at 100% at 0 FPS, meaning that 2 cores isn’t enough for the sound alone). The idea is by taking half the cores offline, the remaining cores get exclusive access to the floating point modules so that the overall pipeline no longer gets backlogged trying to schedule floating point tasks with CPU cores that are idling due to the floating point modules being maxed out.

If spatial audio with such complex processing is the future of gaming, perhaps we need advances to offload these computations to the GPU, or perhaps make some sort of audio processing module that can handle these kinds of tasks (think beefed up sound card).

Don't make blanket statements like this! One post above yours I detail how I happened to get this bug ever since 6.01 came out, and guess what... I have a AMD Phenom II X6.

[Cornet]

I thought I'd come back with more of my own experimentation. I'd started to try to write a bug report, but I realized there was some things I hadn't tried yet that I probably really should first, since I'm sitting here with such an ancient CPU, I want to have all my ducks in a row so they don't laugh any report I make away. lol I've also mostly been testing in FATES, since they're quick to test. I really need to venture into more things. So, yeah, I'm not sure I'm any closer to making one yet... as my results have been as interesting as they are headscratching.

It was good few pages back so... I'm here with an Athlon II X4. Athlon II's are siblings to the Phenom cpus, the difference being they lack L3 cache. Mine's on the lower end, a 620 which sports only 2.6mhz (which prolly is bottlenecking my gtx 670 lol) That it's been doing so well with the game has been miraculous. I'm comfortably still in the 50-60 fps range most of the time, only few spots really tanking it. (Like, y'know, Limsa aetheryte plaza lmao)

I'd really had no troubles until the patch dropped. I do a fair bit of streaming, so I literally even have video in FATES before the patch with the audio all hunky dory, then after and the audio is stuttering horribly.

Initially I tried what everyone was talking about, priority in Task Manager and adjusting the audio quality and I tried swapping from the nvidia hdmi output to my onboard sound with some speakers... and the more I poked at these things, it just seemed to get WORSE somehow. Even on a clean boot, with every background thing closed. It was somehow now unbearable, even getting that crackling in the loading screen. So much I threw up my hands and plum did a restore point before the patch even... which by all rights shouldn't have done anything, but seemingly it reset to normal sucky again instead of ungodly bad.

Next, I decided I guess I really should try dx9... WELL. I didn't test long enough tbh... I prolly should try it a bit more, but I didn't notice any audio problems the few FATES I did, but it felt awful to play with my fps dropped drastically. I couldn't stand it, so I rebooted and set it back to dx11 and got back on.

...the stuttering somehow had lessened even more. Why? I have no idea. It really does not make a lick of sense. It didn't completely go. One fate would be fine, the next, it'd be there here and there. It really seems to depend on the sounds and how many are playing at the same time, from what I've experienced. The more sounds layering, the more it seems to have issue. Like I found a certain, uh, new cactuar has an attack that's VERY noisy, and dear god, does that cause stutter. Single combat? It's fine. But really does make you headscratch how then does issues pop up in the *loading screen*?

Around this time, I decided it was time I updated XIV on my lappy to see how it would do. My laptop is a MSI cx61... not specifically a gaming lappy, but it still sported a nvidia 640m and it has an i5 3210m 2.5mhz that turbos to 3.1. It's an 8-9 year old lappy now. I used to play a lot on it, but the gpu is struggling a bit more with the game these days, but yeah, it was hunky dory with the audio though. No stuttering at all.

So I went back to my desktop. I decided to yolo. (I do not recommend to anyone to try this, lemme make that clear right here. lol) I've pondered the idea of overclocking my cpu a little for awhile... it's meant to oc quite well, so I finally went for it. I didn't go remotely as far as it can potentially be nudged up to, but it's now happily sitting at 3.2mhz. I wanted to give this a shot cause I'd been watching Performance in Windows Task Manager and noticed when the stutters happened, it was making some REALLY huge cpu spikes, that were peaking to 100 usage.

Well. I played a bunch last night while in a Discord call, and... things seemed fine?! I didn't notice any stutter. I even set the objects number back to 'normal' over the change to 'low'. I haven't streamed yet, so that'll be the big test, but yeah. I'm not here suggesting remotely that WELL THAT FIXED THAT, cause watch, knowing my luck, I'll play today and it'll come back. lol

SO yeah. It's so baffling and curious... especially how all you with FX cpus are having even more problems then our Phenom/Athlon II chips. (It seems a bit like FX chips are having their own particular issue... I've yet to see any audio issues in cutscenes, for example.) Not to mention the many other types of cpus that are having issues too. I also can't figure out how such silly things as swapping to dx9 then back to dx11 could possibly change anything. That makes 0 sense. Unexplainable oddities aside, it does feel a bit like though the changes to audio just aren't... well optimized perhaps? Like for not having spatial audio enabled, why is the audio spiking the cpu? But Idk. Just musings. These are things only SE can figure out and I'm an artist, not a programmer. lmao