Audio popping issue

[Maeklos]

Is that consistent? I mean, if you relog and do the same thing like 4-5 times, do you get the same results with the same settings? It seems like 7 or 8 might just be from randomness.

Breaking the sound engine without tinkering with any settings is consistent (usually taking 2-3 casts to break it). So anything that pushes it that far back is an anomaly.

[Jizu]

I did an interesting experiment.

I went into the settings for my speakers. (Right-click speaker icon in the bottom right of Windows -> Sounds -> Playback -> Selected my speakers -> Properties)
The very last tab at the top of the properties window? Spatial Sound. I turned this on (and had to restart FF, because of course I did). When I got back in game, the sound was muted, muddy, and sounded "underwater". I normally play with FF's Master Sound at 30 and my PC sound at 40% (because my speakers get -loud-) With the Windows Spatial Sound turned on, I had to crank FF's Master Sound all the way up to 100% as well as crank my PC sound up to 70% just to get an equivalent sound level. (For comparison, before I fired FF up again, I unpaused the video I'd been watching on Hulu. The sound level was exactly the same *after* I turned on Spatial Audio as before, which indicates that the issue with spatial audio is in FF, not anywhere else.)

I went to the Rising Stones and fired off Dyskrasia. It definitely took more casts than normal (7-8 instead of 2-3) to break the sound engine. But it still broke.

What's perhaps most interesting to me is that Windows comes equipped with a Spatial Sound option that exactly mimics what people have said that the stupid third party plugin does: muted sound, muddy sound, underwater sound.

Funny that SE would push us to buy a plugin that Windows comes with for free, no? Especially if they both mess up audio in the exact same way.

I figured I'd try this, bcs I'm grasping at straws. I also tried the quadraphonic sound.
In world FATEs still triggered it BAD. Once it started I even the sound menue was broken for way longer than usual. I loaded into a Trial to see how it goes with other players in a smaller instance. Ended up with Shiva (Hard) and it happend a few times. Less than usual (maybe I'm just huffing copium) but still noticably annoying. Once I loaded back into the world it stuttered again. I wasn't in combat nor next to other players.

I've not been playing for the past week+ only logging in to test someones newst idea to fix it. Not only is it that much worse since 6.01 but I have the feeling it's getting worse everyday. (Whilst I felt in the time from 6.0 to 6.01 it got better everyday.)

[Baa]

Snipped the quote:

...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....

Thank you for mentioning audio buffer. I recall having reduced my audio latency, and removing that (i.e. increasing latency back to default) fixed the popping/crackling problems for me. I don't play on Windows though, so I'm not sure how to check that on Windows in general.

[Maeklos]

Ended up with Shiva (Hard) and it happend a few times. Less than usual (maybe I'm just huffing copium) but still noticably annoying. Once I loaded back into the world it stuttered again. I wasn't in combat nor next to other players.

Shiva and other ARR trials do seem to be alright (I had Shiva myself last night with no problems), so long as you aren't playing a melee class. If you're playing a healer or caster and standing at the edge of the fight, you might notice that it doesn't shutter much (if at all). I think that's because ARR trials were basically just empty arenas with next to zero visual clutter, nothing that could cause positional audio issues. Which is why I think I've had zero problems in Shiva and Ifrit, but Tsukoyomi and other post-ARR trials I've had have broken from the outset.

Now, if you're playing a melee class with abilities firing off all around you, or playing in a later trial, then the problem explodes.

[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.

[Vyriun]

Hey everyone, wanted to chime in with my experience although it is different than what a lot of you outlined, I wanted to post my fix just in case there are others that happen to be in my position as well. So I was experiencing similar audio (and sometimes visual) stuttering that a lot of people have outlined since Endwalker released. I tried lowering all settings, exiting all processes, switching the audio channel, etc etc. Nothing was working (except switching to DX9 did help a little, but not completely) until finally I found that switching the Power Plan of my desktop helped. (Can be searched via Power Options > Additional Power Options). It was originally on "Performance" and switching it to "Balance" fixed all of my issues for me.

Keep in mind, mine is probably more of a very specific case where it was on my end, and doesn't have anything to do with the sound bug that has been confirmed, but it has been reported that Windows 10 has an issue with these power plans and bottlenecking applications.

[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

[Ariah_Azuna]

Made an account just to post a bug report, though I have absolutely no hope that this will be fixed in 6.05.
The closest I've come to just being able to enjoy the game as I did before is having a friend stream their audio to me over discord. :\

[brothrtychus]

Same issue, extreme sound stuttering during raids. Makes game miserable to play.

[Maeklos]

Hey everyone, wanted to chime in with my experience although it is different than what a lot of you outlined, I wanted to post my fix just in case there are others that happen to be in my position as well. So I was experiencing similar audio (and sometimes visual) stuttering that a lot of people have outlined since Endwalker released. I tried lowering all settings, exiting all processes, switching the audio channel, etc etc. Nothing was working (except switching to DX9 did help a little, but not completely) until finally I found that switching the Power Plan of my desktop helped. (Can be searched via Power Options > Additional Power Options). It was originally on "Performance" and switching it to "Balance" fixed all of my issues for me.

Keep in mind, mine is probably more of a very specific case where it was on my end, and doesn't have anything to do with the sound bug that has been confirmed, but it has been reported that Windows 10 has an issue with these power plans and bottlenecking applications.

Can confirm, changing power modes does *not* help with FX-related audio bugs.