Audio popping issue

[Elliah-Seraheart]

First of all, I'm done sitting around and hoping for things to get better. I've been having this issue since 02.12.2021 and was one of the very first posters on this thread. I'm about to run out of the spatial audio trial and I'm sure as hell not about to purchase it. I've gone from disappointed, to impatient, to insulted, to absolutely effin furious.

That said - posts in here are getting worse and worse. Recent pages have just been people who've been having issues since 6.0.1 basically rediscovering the issues because they are too lazy to read - thereby filling the thread with low quality information. We've got 65 pages of people actually doing work. Stop posting the same low quality information over and over again. Stating the same issue for the 500th time is not going to do anything. Stating where and when you encountered stuttering, or what ability you used is entirely inconsequential. This is not a selective issue. And this approach is not going to get us anywhere ever. Go through the list below, then take further ACTUAL steps to provide square/embody with real information.
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I compiled a "battle plan" so to speak. Based on the former software developers comments below, I've brought together pretty much any remedy I could find online and in this thread.
GO THROUGH THE LIST.

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've been reading up on how audio latency, buffering and frequency works. And I'd very much encourage everyone in this thread to do the same. I'm almost 100% sure that the helpful little lalafell in this thread was spot on, with square/embody simply having to increase the audio buffer, because the floating point calculations needed to process spatial audio are incredibly taxing - especially so on the Bulldozer Architecture FX series from AMD. In either case: PLS GO THROUGH THE FOLLOWING STEPS.

Step -1. You should have already done this

1. Get FFXIV's stupid ass spatial audio thing. It has a trial. Do not buy this thing. It's implementation is why you are having issues to begin with. Download it at https://embody.co/pages/ffxiv . Make a picture of your ear for esoteric audiophile pseudoscience reasons. Enable spatial audio in the FFXIV Sound Options. Be infuriated at the irony of having to install the very thing that broke audio for you, to remedy the audio by a little.

2.) Set your listening position all the way to character

3.) Set ambient Volume as low as possible (1,2). DO NOT mute Ambient and do not set it to 0. Also make sure wireless controller Speaker Sound is set to none, Volume 0 AND muted. Equalizer: Standard.

4.) System Configuration -> Other Option -> Character and Object Quantity: Low

5.) Character Configuration -> Control Settings -> Character -> Disable or Show Limited on Party and Others.

6.) Windows Control Panel -> Sound -> Rightclick your Device -> Properties -> Enhancements -> Disable all Enhancements

7.) Advanced Tab -> Default Format as low as possible

8.) Spatial Sound Tab -> Off

9.) Blatantly ignore square's condescending, illinformed, maliciously reductionst advice to use DX9 out of sheer spite. If their reasoning for our issues is "your CPU is 10 years old" - our reasoning for not using DX9 is "It's 27 years old". Fuck that.

10.) Apply "official" fixes anyway and scale down graphical options as per the official reply in this thread. Enable LODs and such.

11.) Make sure neither your GPU nor CPU are overheating, or running at near capacity when playing FFXIV. Lower settings and/or improve ventilation if that's the case. If you have low FPS in addition to audio issues - you already failed here and are skirting the line of minimum requirements. Your CPU might get a little hotter and be a little more taxed because of the audio issues - sending you over the edge, where your CPU desperately down throttles to not katamari itself. Run the benchmark test further down - if that is you.

Step 0. How we measure improvements - LatencyMon

Get LatencyMon at https://www.resplendence.com/download/LatencyMon.exe
Run a test and make a screenshot. Save the screenshot to save your baseline before changes.

1.) Enable Ultra Performance Mode

Windows->Power Shell -> Open as administrator -> enter "powercfg -duplicatescheme e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb61"

Then go to Control Panel -> System -> Power Options -> Additional Plans -> Enable Ultra Performance Mode

2.) Disable Core Parking

Windowskey + R -> "regedit" - > enter

Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\54533251-82be-4824-96c1-47b60b740d00
Locate the entry "0cc5b647-c1df-4637-891a-dec35c31858"
Double Click "Attribute"
Change "1" to "0"

Go back to Control Panel -> System -> Power Options -> Additional Plans -> Ultra Performance Mode
Click "Change power Plan" -> Click "Change advanced power setting"
Processor Power Management -> processor performance core park min cores
Make sure Setting: 100% is displayed.

3.) Hard Drive compression and Indexing

Go to "Computer”
Right click each hard drive and select “Properties”
Turn off both "Compress this drive to save disk space" and "allow this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties"

THIS MAY TAKE A WHILE

4.) Page File Settings (For Computers with 4-6 GB RAM)

Windows -> Type advanced system settings
Performance -> Settings -> Advanced -> Virtual Memory -> Change

Turn off "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives"

Disable Page files on your slower drive (your HDD), and enable it on your faster drive or SSD.
Assign around 1.5x your total physical RAM to drives as paging files. 4 GB physical RAM x 1.5 = 6GB assigned paging file.

This is almost entirely useless for people with above 8 GB of RAM.

5.) Processor Scheduling

Windows -> Type "advanced system settings" -> Performance -> Settings -> Advanced -> Allow the best performance of: Background processes. (Some people may have better results with the other setting - this should generally however introduce some pseudo buffering and may be alleviating the buffering problems with the FFXIV Audio)

6.) Disable unused audio devices

Go to Device Manager -> Sound, Video and Game Controllers
Rightclick and disable all unused Sound Cards / Drivers.

7.) Disable USB Selective Suspend

Go to Control Panel -> System -> Power Options -> Ultra Performance Mode -> Change Plan Settings -> Change Advanced Plan Settings -> USB Settings -> Selective Suspend: Disabled.
Go to Device Manager -> USB Controllers -> Rightclick every entry containing the words "USB Root Hub" or "USB Hub" and go to properties. Go to Power Management. Make sure "Allow the Computer to disable this device to save power" is off.

8.) Doublecheck that there's no third party Equalizers or third party audio enhancement software running

Also make sure that Realtek Hight Definition Audio doesnt have an equalizer running. Check by going to control panel - > show small icons -> Realtek High Definition Audio Manager

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A.) Check Improvements / Lack thereof & Post Results

• Play FF14. See if issues got better/worse.

• Do a LatencyMon test. Make screenshot. Note improvements. Post result.

• Do the Endwalker Benchmark Test. https://download.finalfantasyxiv.com...lker-bench.zip. Make a Screenshot of results. Post it.

• Post your System Specs. CPU, GPU, Memory, Motherboard, Operating System.

B.) What you can ACTUALLY do to help get the issue fixed.

• Post your video to youtube.

• Stream your blantantly broken game on twitch/youtube as much as you can.

• Post into the official reddit thread from embody over here https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...e_from_embody/

• Alert square staff and embody staff on twitter and reddit.

• File a bug report. With complete information. Through the ingame feature. Through the forums.

• Post results from above steps in here.

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Be respectful when engaging with devs and other people about the issues.

[Elliah-Seraheart]

Bugreport:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...63#post5771863

Remedies applied:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...69#post5777769

Video Evidence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLQW6ShIkJY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYGu2rv3gbg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX5gt0Dhwd4

CPU: AMD FX 8320
GPU Nvidia 1070 Ti (30.0.14.9709)
RAM: 32 GB RAM DDR3 (4x Patriot Signature 8GB PSD38G16002 / 1600 MHz / CL11 / 1 X 8GB)
Motherboard: ASRock 970 Pro3 V2.0
USB Stereo Headset 41k Hz 16 Bit
Realtek High Definition Audio 6.0.9132.1
Windows 10 Pro 64 bit (10.0.19042)

[MiaShino]

snip

This is a post most fascinating as it demonstrates clear video evidence of how to replicate some of this issue. Easy replication is incredibly helpful when diagnosing issues however, I have major problem with title of video and implication of post.

Within the first video I chose to watch you can see clear spike in CPU workload while there is decrease in GPU utilization indicating a definite CPU bottleneck here. I have utilized my fantastic mspaint skills to circle relevant bits of stuffs.
https://i.ibb.co/Mf4hNjV/p1.png - before Ambient is muted (GPU 66%, CPU 49%, FPS 132)
https://ibb.co/chxjNrw - after Ambient is muted (GPU 62%, CPU 72%, FPS 123)

During this moment your GPU was momentarily bottlenecked resulting in decrease of fps.

This is taken from; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX5gt0Dhwd4

Second scene in above video demonstrates both rise in GPU utilization and CPU load. Before can comment further, are you perhaps playing at uncapped frame rate or 144hz? You may have answered this in post, many apologies if I have missed it. It is far more likely that the increase in GPU usage seen here is a result of scene rendering complexity vs the inn room.

Other question one lala has is related to OBS. Are you using cpu encoding or nvenc when recording these?

I feel must reiterate point I made in previous post. You absolutely cannot rely on temperature and hardware utilization alone.

It is significantly more common especially when running at higher frame rates to encounter a GPU bottleneck far before CPU bottleneck. You are much less likely to see total saturation of your CPU for reasons varied. This is one reason why for much time Intel outperformed Ryzen during gaming workloads despite having superior core count.

Anything ranging from architectural constraints to other system bottlenecks can easily prevent the cpu from being fully saturated, yet you will experience slowdowns. Opening task manager and seeing 72% utilization accompanied by slowdowns can be alarming as you should have additional headroom when you in fact do not.

snip

Hmm, this is indeed in line with my theory. I was going to suggest overclocking to those willing. It does appear the sound engine is making far too many calls to the audio api then it should reasonably be. Easy solution for Square would be to temporarily limit the number of audio sources preferably dynamically, this would require them writing code that can detect abnormal audio latency then adjust accordingly. Plenty of open source stuffs on how to write such code in the emulator space.

snip

Mah! Am happy I have been able to help! I am most woefully out of practice but also have many smart friends to help too. Buffering audio before it reaches your ears is incredibly common. It is done everywhere yet done so you will not notice. Increasing this buffer (I am making things simple please forgive) could also be temporary solution. However there is catch as in all things. Increase buffer too far and there will be audio delays. The goal when developing sound engine is to be certain that the game loop lines up with audio presented or delays will not be noticed. The more I look into the more it seems Square would have to increase audio delay to noticeable levels. Think casting spell then hearing effect of sound after spell is cast not as effect is occurring.

Just to clarify, my previous post regarding CPUs that are older than 10 years is one of the possible causes that we have confirmed from the investigation and it is still possible to occur with other CPUs. I apologize if my message wasn't clear on that part.

Yes, because the Embody team failed to test their spatial audio engine on wide range of hardware or to properly test period. Now Square must work with third party developer back and forth to resolve the issue. This is why in software development you should avoid working with out of house developers on mainline projects. This is idea most terrible. You do not do this. It is preferable to hire these developers to work in house directly, this means you have direct line of communication with them. It is unholy nightmare to work with third parties at times and better to write the code yourself.

Now Square audio engineering team must work with code they likely did not write and cannot fix. It is painfully clear from looking into this that because of this decision there will be major delays in implementing a proper working solution.

I adore this game but seriously, game packs are a terrible terrible idea. Perhaps on small indie project but not something with the scope and size of FF14. Whoever signed off on this goofed. There is no nice way to put it.

Also, cannot seem to replicate on PS4 myself, more testing needed. That is all!

Edit; The more I look into Immerse Gaming™ the more damning evidence becomes. Product on Steam that did not meet deadline, questionable user reviews, and system requirements that simply confuse; Requirements for their HIVE software - Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD Phenom X3

Hardly workhorse CPUs listed right here..

[Elliah-Seraheart]

This is a post most fascinating as it demonstrates clear video evidence of how to replicate some of this issue. Easy replication is incredibly helpful when diagnosing issues however, I have major problem with title of video and implication of post.

My takeaway was, that the audio issues are increasing strain on my system - not the other way around - hence the title. But I honestly don't know enough about any of this to make either statement. Am I wrong about this?

I think it's important to note here, that I actually had to go back and reseat my RAM after this video - video made me realise I only had half my RAM showing up in Task manager. If that makes a difference at all.

What would be a correct title - for any future watchers? What would be the correct takeaway from this?

Within the first video I chose to watch you can see clear spike in CPU workload while there is decrease in GPU utilization indicating a definite CPU bottleneck here. I have utilized my fantastic mspaint skills to circle relevant bits of stuffs.
https://i.ibb.co/Mf4hNjV/p1.png - before Ambient is muted (GPU 66%, CPU 49%, FPS 132)
https://ibb.co/chxjNrw - after Ambient is muted (GPU 62%, CPU 72%, FPS 123)

During this moment your GPU was momentarily bottlenecked resulting in decrease of fps.

I am aware that I've got a CPU bottleneck with my system. I mostly use this PC to work with adobe programs - gaming is a secondary concern - officially. In fact, I was able to 100% write off all my parts from my yearly tax report. Only reason I've not yet replaced my CPU/Motherboard is because that wouldnt fly. I basically build this pc based on what I could get the government to reimburse me for. I'd actually have to pay money to solve the CPU bottleneck :-P

Now - how relevant is the bottleneck for the audio issue?

This is taken from; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX5gt0Dhwd4

Second scene in above video demonstrates both rise in GPU utilization and CPU load. Before can comment further, are you perhaps playing at uncapped frame rate or 144hz? You may have answered this in post, many apologies if I have missed it. It is far more likely that the increase in GPU usage seen here is a result of scene rendering complexity vs the inn room.

Other question one lala has is related to OBS. Are you using cpu encoding or nvenc (new) when recording these?

I am playing at uncapped framerate. Yes. My monitor is set to 60hz. Supports up to 75 hz. I did record this using nvenc in OBS. Does this defeat the purpose of the video? Apologies, I do not really stream - I just make recordings here and there for personal reasons. So I dont really think much about my settings.

I feel must reiterate point I made in previous post. You absolutely cannot rely on temperature and hardware utilization alone. (...)

I am aware. I unfortunately made that video a few hours before your enlightening post some 10-15 pages back.

[MiaShino]

My takeaway was, that the audio issues are increasing strain on my system - not the other way around - hence the title. But I honestly don't know enough about any of this to make either statement.

I think it's important to note here, that I actually had to go back and reseat my RAM after this video - video made me realise I only had half my RAM showing up in Task manager. If that makes a difference at all.

What would be a correct title - for any future watchers? What would be the correct takeaway from this?

Ohhh, only issue was in suggesting it may be gpu issue as I am fairly certain the audio engine does not perform any calculations on the gpu. Uncertain what proper title could be though.

I am aware that I've got a CPU bottleneck with my system. I mostly use this PC to work with adobe programs - gaming is a secondary concern. In fact, I was able to 100% write off all my parts from my yearly tax report. Only reason I've not yet replaced my CPU/Motherboard is because that wouldnt fly. I'd actually have to pay money for it :-P

By the twelve no, not with this current awful awful market. I am still running one i7 4790K. These FX cpus are more then sufficient for FF14 and should they switch away from Dx11 to low level api (Vulkan) in the future you may even see decreased cpu load.

Now - how relevant is the bottleneck for the audio issue?

I believe exceptionally, though bottleneck has less to do with the age of cpu and more with the architecture its self.

I am playing at uncapped framerate. Yes. My monitor is set to 60hz. Supports up to 75 hz. I did record this using nvenc in OBS. Does this defeat the purpose of the video? Apologies, I do not really stream - I just make recordings here and there for personal reasons. So I dont really think much about my settings.

Ahhhh yup! I thought so because unless you were using some form of adaptive sync you would never see refresh rate sync to 123 like that. Also nope nope, nvenc was what I hoped you were using. If you were cpu encoding that might muddy results with it increasing cpu load quite substantially.

I am aware. I unfortunately made that video a few hours before your enlightening post some 10-15 pages back.

Tis okay! I am only hoping to assist others in figuring this out and helping make certain they look in the correct places when diagnosing. Mah! English is driving me bonkers!

The video was rather enlightening though, a 49% to 72% jump in cpu load simply by muting one audio channel is.. alarming. I believe no one here needs me to say that this should not be occurring. Something else I caught when re-watching, there was brief moment where the entire game process stalled when you muted ambient sound. Ummm roughly 10 frames I thinks. That is also well, strange.

Edit: I just checked the in-game bug reports page, and it seems many of these bug reports have been moved to "duplicate bugs". Now I'm not very familiar with these forums, I only made an account to post here about this issue, but a sticky thread on that page says the bug reports in "duplicate bugs" won't be investigated. I have a bad feeling about this.

Speaking of this, I have one curiosity door that requires closing. Would anyone be willing to run FF14 while placing their cpu under artificial load, then attempt to re-create the audio stuttering issue?

[Elliah-Seraheart]

Speaking of this, I have one curiosity door that requires closing. Would anyone be willing to run FF14 while placing their cpu under artificial load, then attempt to re-create the audio stuttering issue?

Sure. If you need me to fold proteins or mine etherium with my CPU, GPU or both - I can provide. I do that most of the time anyway. Is that a sufficient "load"? Or what would you have me do?

[MiaShino]

Sure. If you need me to fold proteins or mine etherium with my CPU, GPU or both - I can provide. I do that most of the time anyway. Is that a sufficient "load"? Or what would you have me do?

That should be enough to thoroughly tax any cpu, especially stuffs like folding at home. I only need cpu test though and many many thanks!

[GorthRedsteel]

Post into the official reddit thread from embody over here https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...e_from_embody/

I'd rather play a broken game that makes my ears bleed than to ever use >LE RED DIT