Audio popping issue

[Maeklos]

I myself am using a FX 8320 which from what I see is only "slightly" lower then the FX 8350 (About 6%) so if that 8350 is above recommend requirements, mine should absolutely be okay then.

If you're curious, run the Endwalker benchmark. Most of us with 8350s were punching WAY above average. When I ran mine after the benchmark first came out, it scored just over 13500. (Like, 13507 or something.) Which put it just shy of the very highest tier (15,000).

[MoonstalkerZ]

Did some testing fighting mobs in the Black Shroud. I was fighting a single mob, and two other mobs were in the background. I was the only player on screen. Fighting the single mob with my basic 1-2-3 attack, while facing away from the camera and with my character between the camera and the mob, produced awful stuttering. Without moving the camera at all, I ran behind the mob so that the mob was between the camera and my character, and turned around so that my character was facing the camera. Now my 1-2-3 attack produced no stuttering at all. I switched positions several times, always with the same result.

The only things that changed in this situation were 1) which direction my character was facing, and 2) whether my character was between the camera and the mob or not. Everything that was on screen while the stuttering was horrible was also on screen while the stuttering was nonexistent. No computer settings or hardware changed between the two situations. The problem was entirely caused by the position of my character relative to the mob and/or which direction he was facing. If the stuttering was caused by having insufficient processing power, I doubt simply moving my character two feet forward and turning him around would somehow reduce the processing power required.

There is also the consideration that people with much more powerful processors than I have are hearing worse stuttering than I am - for me the problem doesn't happen with every fight, and I can always fix it by running behind the mob and facing the camera, though of course this usually isn't a practical solution. Meanwhile, people with more powerful processors are apparently unable to alleviate the problem at all, or the camera fix only works momentarily.

I'm not going to deny that the game needs sufficient processing power to run properly, to claim otherwise would be ridiculous. But I'm getting sound bugs after a major change to the sound system, in an area from 2012 that runs at 100 fps, bugs that are worse for people with better cpus, bugs that can be alleviated by slightly changing the position of my character while changing nothing else - if that's 100% caused by not having enough processing power, I'll eat my hat.

[Maeklos]

I'm not going to deny that the game needs sufficient processing power to run properly, to claim otherwise would be ridiculous. But I'm getting sound bugs after a major change to the sound system, in an area from 2012 that runs at 100 fps, bugs that are worse for people with better cpus, bugs that can be alleviated by slightly changing the position of my character while changing nothing else - if that's 100% caused by not having enough processing power, I'll eat my hat.

It is 100% caused by the positional audio rework in the new sound engine.

[Vimak-Areseia]

I would like to add something, I havent read all the comments in this 54 page thread, but I've been playing Endwalker since Early Access... playing it up till last Tuesday (12/21) and I had literally 0 problems with the audio, not a stutter, not a pop, nothing. I did ALL kinds of content, from dungeon grinding as a Reaper on launch, to watching all the MSQ cutscenes and doing all the trials-- nothing of the sort.

Patch 6.01 comes out, the game sound stutters here and there, I don't pay too much mind... then I get to specifically the "Asphodelus: Fourth Circle" fight and that one... the music sounded SO crunchy, stuttering all of a sudden, no real FPS drops that would cause this, but I was stunned, I thought something was wrong with the specific song... but then I start doing different things and starting seeing no, its not just the one song.

I hope this a priority because-- even though my CPU is older, my game was working fine UNTIL whatever changes they tried to "fix" people's problems, making it worse for them and introducing it to others.

Hopefully this account helps and shows them that as much as it could be a hardware thing, it isn't fair if even someone that had no problem before got "introduced" the problem with an update-- seems like its completely avoidable if that's the case, doesn't it?

[-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).

[XenophineEX]

I also have this issue. If I do not keep the audio 100% on character it only makes it worse. It isn't clicking or popping though... it is like someone is turning the sound on and off rapidly. For cutscenes I fixed the voiced parts by switching to Japanese voice. Turned objects to minimum, and windows to 10 only helped with initial stuttering when teleporting to a dense city. Anywhere around camp dragonhead, if you engage with the enemy in the snow it always happens, the stuttering that would make you think your pc is going to explode, yet everything on screen is running at a constant 60 fps. The only fix I have right now is to simply turn my speakers off when it happens in a fight. Which also affords me the opportunity to see it is not my hardware. Playing soundless with zero frame lagging or any type of in game visual stutter pins this squarely (pun slightly intended) on the new in game audio engine.

*edit*
I would also like to add this problem became to the point I had to voice input on it after this latest patch. 6.01 to be exact. It was occurring during 6.0 but fiddling with settings fixed it. As of 6.01 the sound files themselves sound like they are corrupted. Case in point the base in revenants toll within the base will play its music smoothly till certain sections of the song, then will always start stuttering at the same points with nothing else or anything taxing happening on the screen. Mayhap the sound files themselves they are pulling from are... "damaged".

[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.

[GorthRedsteel]

I'm a time traveler from the future and bring you the official response from Square Enix regarding this sound issue:
"just stop being poor and buy better hardware lol"

[polyphanes]

Also, in addition to my technical concerns from earlier in the thread, I'd also like to point out and echo the sentiment of others: this audio issue is severely dampening my desire to play FFXIV, which is disappointing and troubling.

- If I play as-is, the audio stuttering is so bad that I either develop severe headaches or am forced to play the game on mute.

- If I play with the Immerse Gamepack for FFXIV, not only does audio stutering still persist in many fights (especially non non-Standard equalizer modes) albeit at a somewhat reduced level, but the spatialization feels unnatural, unintuitive, and nausea-inducing, which also forces me to play the game on mute.

- If I play the game on mute, well...that's a solid half of the entire experience, plus a variety of mechanics-based and player-based sound cues, that I'm missing out on. It's a depressing experience.

This is a bad issue to have on all fronts, and it's getting to the point where I'd rather not play the game at all than have a continuously bad and frustrating experience with the game.

[XenophineEX]

It is 100% caused by the positional audio rework in the new sound engine.

It is exactly what this person stated. Forcing us to listen to "3d" while in stereo is causing areas of our audio to drop between left and right channels, as they have added 3 more, back left, back right, and center. They seem to have neglected "stereo" altogether and figure we will all use surround sound.

*edit*
Make no mistake though, enabling virtualized surround only makes the problem worse. Instead of switching to center it just mutes the sound, it will sound like whispering in the left and right channels. Stuttering whispering. And the fact remains the music always stutters at the exact same points regardless of what is happening. Which indicates to me they corrupted their entire musical and sound library to force this unwelcome change on us. Apart from rechecking hash on your downloaded files... the original sources are now corrupted so you can re-download the game 1000 times, just to have the same results. Until Square Enix fixes the original source files for audio it is doomed to stutter.