Stutters only in FF14, sometimes hours between stutters

[Beavertales]

(I think we spoke on Reddit; hi!)

I just want to echo this sentiment. I think there are several stutter issues (the most common being from iCue and controllers), but this random, inconsistent, short stutter is something I have too.

I’ve done everything the author has. A completely clean install of Windows with nothing but 14 and a keyboard and mouse can’t fix it. I’ve also tried swapping PSUs, SSDs, and memory to no avail.

My specs are these:

AMD 7800x3D
3080 Ti
32 GB 6000MHz DDR5

My sense is it’s possibly an AMD issue. I’ve seen some people with Intel report issues, but they’re usually the controller or iCue issue.

If you have this problem and have Intel, it’d be really interesting to hear about. And if you have AMD and have this specific issue (not the framerate staying low, or a regular interval stutter but just completely random full ~1s game stops) please add to it here.

I’m bilingual and live in Japan. I have a post on the Japanese forums about this too, but the more data we can get the better. I can post to my thread there as well.

We did! Hello! There has been a small suspicion on my end that this may be an AMD issue as well, as a good amount of people I've seen having issues most similar to mine are using X3D chips. However, I also have a friend that's running a 7800X3D who has been helping me troubleshoot this who has had no issues. Have you looked in Event Viewer to see if there are any errors that happen at the time of the stutters? My findings have been inconsistent, but there are sometimes a large amount (10+) of Event ID 131 metadata staging errors that occur at the time of the stutters. Sometimes there is no clear event or error, though.

It's relieving to know that you've tried multiple different kinds of hardware and the issue persists; hopefully that means it's not an issue with my hardware lol!

I'm glad you're able to post on the JP forums as well. This is obviously a pretty minor issue, at least for me, since I can go 7+ hours without any issues or hiccups at all, but it's still disappointing that people like you and I are not having a flawless experience on higher end rigs. I'm very interested to know anything new you find!

EDIT: I've found that those Event ID 131 errors happen any time I plug in any usb connection. Unplugging/plugging in usb devices doesn't cause any frame drops in other games, but always cause my fps AND gpu usage to dip in 14. Disabling automatic driver downloading in windows makes the errors stop happening, but unplugging/plugging in usb devices still causes 14 to stutter. My current theory is that something changed with 14 with the DT update that makes 14 have to wait and think while windows is processing usb-related changes in the background. It would make sense, since the GPU usage also dips, so it would check out if it was waiting for the cpu to stop processing the usb-related background processes before it can continue to render frames. This may all be coincidence and have absolutely nothing to do with it, but I figured I'd just add this in for the sake of thoroughness.