Audio popping issue

[Maeklos]

I've found all the new classes with super aoe seem to trigger sound stuttering. You would be hard pressed to find a tank that only does 3 at a time. 100% of the ones I have encountered even with 2 dragoons with limited aoe, run about gathering half the dungeon only to then have the sound cut out horribly. And then have the fight take 4x longer than it should.

Too many WoW refugee's, they are adopting their old methods in a new game; And it is breaking it.

Don't even try to tell them to slow down either, the tank will proclaim he is the only dps needed. And you will forfeit your commendations. Just stay silent, and deal with the fallout.

This isn't just WoW refugees. You see it on a lot of arrogant tank mains who think that just because they got Sastasha or Copperbell on their roulette that they'll do wall to wall pulls. Like it's the healer's main perogative to keep them alive so that their crappy AoE can take 15 minutes to burn down the 5 groups they pulled, all while their DPS is dropped so low they've only got 1 or 2 single target abilities and no AoE whatsoever. Only times I've ever wiped in a pre-30 dungeon are because of arrogant tank mains.

[XenophineEX]

This isn't just WoW refugees. You see it on a lot of arrogant tank mains who think that just because they got Sastasha or Copperbell on their roulette that they'll do wall to wall pulls. Like it's the healer's main perogative to keep them alive so that their crappy AoE can take 15 minutes to burn down the 5 groups they pulled, all while their DPS is dropped so low they've only got 1 or 2 single target abilities and no AoE whatsoever. Only times I've ever wiped in a pre-30 dungeon are because of arrogant tank mains.

I am seeing a lot of "rush rush rush" blame the dps for not being their favored aoe casters then being total shiats afterwards. I dread end game, if this is the mentality of the tanks running newer players.

Good luck watching any cutscenes with these guys. 15 seconds into it you'll get the message you'll be locked out of the area in 10. They simply don't care.

I'd say that is a bigger problem than the sound stuttering if you ask me. At least I can control it turning my speaker on and off. The dudes running ahead pulling everything expecting you to be a lvl 90 hero on day 1 with no help are not helping the game any. I have nothing that can circumvent them joining and ruining runs.

[Maeklos]

I am seeing a lot of "rush rush rush" blame the dps for not being their favored aoe casters then being total shiats afterwards. I dread end game, if this is the mentality of the tanks running newer players.

Good luck watching any cutscenes with these guys. 15 seconds into it you'll get the message you'll be locked out of the area in 10. They simply don't care.

Don't sweat it. The vast majority of tanks are decent, and will keep an eye on their healer to see what they can conceivably handle. Once you hit Heavensward and onward, DPS will have good AoE, tanks will have plenty of CDs to rotate through, and healers will have most of their fancy heals. As I've been leveling Sage (88 as of right now), I've had the whole gamut of dungeons. I've only had one bad tank (a 63 PLD with that as their only class, so may have been a refugee) out of the few dozen runs I've done as Sage.

Which, getting back to the original point of this thread, has brought up some interesting data points with the sound issues. Crystal Tower raids, by and large, seem to be large unaffected (I think because the raid areas themselves are large and uncluttered, so no echo, etc). Since I'm a healer, I stand outside of the big fights, don't have a lot of positional sound BS going on. No issues.

But earlier dungeons? Copperbell has issues, Brayflox doesn't. Sastasha has issues, most ARR trials don't (I've gotten Ifrit like 5 times in the last week for dungeon roulettes, ugh). So far, I can't find any rhyme or reason to which dungeons might trigger sound issues and which don't.

[Ariel_Valmont]

Don't sweat it. The vast majority of tanks are decent, and will keep an eye on their healer to see what they can conceivably handle. Once you hit Heavensward and onward, DPS will have good AoE, tanks will have plenty of CDs to rotate through, and healers will have most of their fancy heals. As I've been leveling Sage (88 as of right now), I've had the whole gamut of dungeons. I've only had one bad tank (a 63 PLD with that as their only class, so may have been a refugee) out of the few dozen runs I've done as Sage.

Which, getting back to the original point of this thread, has brought up some interesting data points with the sound issues. Crystal Tower raids, by and large, seem to be large unaffected (I think because the raid areas themselves are large and uncluttered, so no echo, etc). Since I'm a healer, I stand outside of the big fights, don't have a lot of positional sound BS going on. No issues.

But earlier dungeons? Copperbell has issues, Brayflox doesn't. Sastasha has issues, most ARR trials don't (I've gotten Ifrit like 5 times in the last week for dungeon roulettes, ugh). So far, I can't find any rhyme or reason to which dungeons might trigger sound issues and which don't.

For me it’s every dungeon/raid I’ve been in since release, and those have spanned all eras of the game.

[XenophineEX]

Everything with snow has sound issues for me. I am up to the second expansion now. Almost everything required in Heavensward stuttered. I only just got to Stormblood. As far as aoe, as a dragoon I got my first aoe combo at 62. The other 2 have cd's 1 is 30 seconds, the other 3 minutes. I see at 90 I have as much aoe as other people, but should I run any dungeon lower than when I get that aoe, well there you go.
Soundwise everything that involves aoe immediately starts skipping, there hasn't been one major pull with over 6 mobs that it hasn't happened. Sounds like the sound effects got thrown into a fan. and it doesn't stop. The healers with the big aoe circles make it worse.

Keep in mind, processor never goes above's 40%; and fps never goes below 60 fps when the stuttering happens. Processor is also a cool 75 degree's while playing. That is in Fahrenheit.

Mayhap the game isn't using all the cores it could be? I can try changing its affinity.

[Teiren]

I'm happy, and confused, to say that I got absolutely zero stuttering in the first duty of the new raid. This was with Listening Position at 62, Party Effects at Limited, Others Effects at None, and Object Quantity at Low. Oh, as for my CPU temperature, from what I recall, it never goes above maybe 72 Celsius, usually around 60 while playing. I was worried the stuttering was ruining my computer, but it probably isn't.

[Grimno]

This is an excellent find! I can confirm I have the same thing happening: the visual alert signals also reflect stuttered/slowed-down audio. On the one hand, this is troubling, since I was already hoping to use visual alerts to get by to rely on something resembling audio cues without having to listen to headache-inducing audio, but if that's *also* being affected, then determining patterns and getting used to it may also be affected. On the other hand, it *is* evidence that this is being produced and used by FFXIV within FFXIV, and not something that FFXIV is itself feeding into (like an external sound driver or something).

But also, it's interesting how different things, while getting stuttered, slow down at different rates. Some things just get choppy in order to keep up with all the stuff that happens, but other sounds (like the BGM) just get slowed down for the duration of the stutter without trying to "catch up" with what we'd expect on a system that doesn't have such issues.

Agreed. That is an excellent find from Maeklos. Shows us with visual proof that it's indeed something on Square's end.

[Rannzyr]

I've found all the new classes with super aoe seem to trigger sound stuttering. You would be hard pressed to find a tank that only does 3 at a time. 100% of the ones I have encountered even with 2 dragoons with limited aoe, run about gathering half the dungeon only to then have the sound cut out horribly. And then have the fight take 4x longer than it should.

Too many WoW refugee's, they are adopting their old methods in a new game; And it is breaking it.

Don't even try to tell them to slow down either, the tank will proclaim he is the only dps needed. And you will forfeit your commendations. Just stay silent, and deal with the fallout.

With all due respect your subjective opinion doesn't really matter.

Wow refugees are not causing this issue, rushed implementation of a flawed sound engine is.

Square enix are 100% responsible for this and your shouldn't try to place blame on players you personally dislike. We can only wait and hope this gets sorted but it probably won't any time soon because it's not an easy fix.

Well, it could be if they bothered to actually let us toggle it but the new deal must have been good

[raelgun]

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 am also curious to how people are running their audio out as well.

directly from the onboard solution - which I am guessing is most of the case here.

Are people running any USB connected devices such as USB headsets, USB powered headphone amps or a USB audio interface (those running a mixer directly from the onboard is still onboard).

Might be worth if people haven't tried to see if messing with the bit rate and sample rate on their audio settings and see if that alleviates things.

I don't get any popping issues with or without the Embody immersion setting on, I do run the game through a USB audio interface.

For sake of clarity my CPU is a Ryzen 5900X so stupidly high end however looking at reports with people with modern CPUs and I think I've seen some posts with the Ryzen 5600X.

Though my post doesn't provide a solution, it might help with narrowing down further any culprits.

[Grimno]

I am also curious to how people are running their audio out as well.

directly from the onboard solution - which I am guessing is most of the case here.

Are people running any USB connected devices such as USB headsets, USB powered headphone amps or a USB audio interface (those running a mixer directly from the onboard is still onboard).

Might be worth if people haven't tried to see if messing with the bit rate and sample rate on their audio settings and see if that alleviates things.

I don't get any popping issues with or without the Embody immersion setting on, I do run the game through a USB audio interface.

For sake of clarity my CPU is a Ryzen 5900X so stupidly high end however looking at reports with people with modern CPUs and I think I've seen some posts with the Ryzen 5600X.

Though my post doesn't provide a solution, it might help with narrowing down further any culprits.

So my Audio is a bit funky.
I guess something happened with my motherboard so trying to run audio directly from the green port in the back does -not- work. There's no audio at all no matter what I've tried from reinstalling sound drivers and more.
So I had to plug in a Roccat JUKE into the USB in the back, and then plug the audio port into that which allowed me to have audio.
So my audio isn't plugged into the motherboard's sound plug directly, but instead plugged in through the USB port.