Audio popping issue

[miragedive]

For the sake of comparison with everyone else, and just so nobody thinks their hardware is to blame, I just ran the benchmark on maximum settings and scored 10,653 (High). With the graphics settings I normally use in game, I scored 15,538 (Extremely High). By all accounts, my hardware is more than capable of running the game. It's genuinely frustrating, because it used to only be in cutscenes (which severely hindered my experience of the story but oh well), but now it significantly impacts raids and the associated FPS drop from the audio process spiking in CPU usage results in some very unwelcome issues in raids.

I really hope someone takes this seriously enough to give us a genuine fix or solution. I played XIV only hours before early access maintenance and it worked perfectly, even in a very very very crowded hunt train. If we don't hear about this over the coming couple of days (since I'm away from home), I'll do a full reinstall of FFXIV and report back with any changes that might result in.

[ShiroLialeth]

The audio stuttering became more frequent since patch 6.01, it's especially bad when playing as Dancer or Reaper.

Another problem that wasn't fixed at all for me is random pops of the "crowd chatter" ambience sound that you usually hear in the starting cities. I hear them everywhere, even when I'm completely alone. This also means that I don't hear the normal soundeffect while being in a city. Sometimes these pops last longer, that's the reason why I was able to hear where it is coming from. Turning off the ambience stops it.

[Au-ro]

Reducing the in game frame rate has stopped the frame rate shifts associated with the stuttering for me. The audio is still bad, but I don't fall to 5fpa as of now. Will update later if it changes. Gunna try some msq and try not to be disappointed.

[AluneTempest]

What's more frustrating about this whole situation is that this is totally a problem on square side, so we can't by themselves find a temporary solution to the problem.

Depend purely on square do her job is the most frustrating part

[Maeklos]

For kicks and giggles, I had two instances of FF14 running - my normal account and a Trial account I'd made a year or so ago. Both running at the same time, 60fps on whichever one I had pulled up at the moment. No lag, nothing. As per usual. (Previous to Endwalker, I was used to running FF14 plus another game like Bannerlord or Rimworld concurrently with zero issues and no fps drop.)

So, I go to the Rising Stones on my level 86 SGE and proceed to break the sound engine by spamming Dyskrasia. I break the sound engine by the second cast, getting stuttering and chopping.

Swap back over to my trial account. No sound issues at all.

Swap back to main account. Sound still broken to the point of BGM and ambient sound being choppy.

[frostybanana]

Hey all, literally just made my forum profile to chime in on this..

I've been having this issue since 6.0 like most and I agree that it actually feels like 6.01 made it worse. I have an older budget built that I had to throw together a few years ago but I really have had no issues playing any games on it including World of Warcraft, Sekiro, Tales of Arise and FF14 until this last patch. Some important parts of my build:

CPU: AMD FX-8320
Graphics: NVIDIA Geforce GTX 960
Motherboard: MSI 970 Gaming
Speakers: Edifier R1280T

Steps I have tried to remedy this issue (all have failed):

-Installed several different iterations of RealTek Audio drivers. I even rolled back to older drivers in order to access the RealTek HD audio manager because someone had mentioned setting your speakers to Stereo from this might alleviate the issue. It did not.
-Updated all motherboard drivers, updated GeForce drivers, flashed the BIOS to latest
-This probably goes without saying, but fiddled with all in game sound and graphic settings. Turned off individual sound volumes (BGM, Ambiance, etc.), made sure EQ set to standard and even downloaded the spatial audio stuff.
-Went to speaker settings and set the quality to lowest per SE guidance. I honestly don't know why I tried this one because I think it's bizarre.
-Killed EVERY background process that was even taking the smallest of CPU usage including bigger things like Chrome and Discord. My CPU usage hovered around 20-25% with FF14 being the only thing opened and never spiked during stuttering.
-Moved the entire game to another SSD (where my OS is stored) because I thought may it was having trouble reading off the one it was on or something... I dunno, thought I'd try it.
-Change the config file to remove some sound settings? I barely recall this one but I tried it pretty early on and don't remember the details of it. Just one of the things people were trying.
-Went into NVIDIA Geforce Control Panel and adjusted 3D settings. The only thing that I saw that was having high usage during FF14 was the 3D usage for my GPU. It was hitting 95-100% at times. I really thought this had to be it because nothing else seemed out of the ordinary. After adjusting the settings (I think I even turned G-sync off at one point), I noticed the usage went down to about 60-65%. BUT, saaaaaame stuttering.
-Try yelling and calling my computer names. Helped a little.


Now I know a lot of people are saying that it's related to the AMD CPU and that could very well be true.. However, I observed no spikes in CPU usage or temperature whilst playing the game so I find this very puzzling. I don't think anyone has any concrete answer as to why and so it's hard to figure out what you're supposed to be fixing.

All the stuff I listed above... feels like it doesn't even really represent the time I actually spent trying to fix this. I researched a lot and tried a ton of just weird "fixes" that I hoped would stick. And so, I'm pretty disappointed with the fact that 6.01 did nothing to resolve this and I don't think we've formally heard much from SE on it. I think if it's a hardware issue (as in you need to buy a new computer), that's problematic because I have no issues playing ANY other games and with the current market I'm not about to drop 2000$ to build a new computer for this.

All that being said... I don't think I'll be playing anymore while this issue is occurring. I powered through the end of Stormblood and I've progressed through a lot of Shadowbringers. But I've gotten to a point where I'm realizing that I am missing out on the cutscenes, the music, and the story as a whole because this is legitimately ruining those parts of the game. If this was WoW, I wouldn't care. But being invested in the story unfortunately has that consequence.

I know my personal situation doesn't really matter in the context of everything. But as someone who's job has significantly slowed down due to the holidays, I'm pretty miffed that there is no fix for this in sight and so I cannot actually play this game during this time.

TL;DR
Tried all fixes, no avail. Will not be playing and missing out on the story until this is fixed. Will definitely come back once this is addressed.

Also one quick post note... When I reported this issue in game they told me to post it on the forums lol

[Teiren]

To add my voice to this, I'm going to copy/paste what I wrote in another thread because this one's bigger, and it's always better to consolidate threads.


The only audio issues I had since 6.0 and before 6.0.1 were as follows:
- Something a little weird with the bass, I think, but not terrible.
- Absolutely no combo sound (not low volume, actually no sound).
- Other people's action volume low, although still audible.
- Combat voices of both PCs and NPCs much louder than they should be. Even the unvoiced sound effect volumes of some NPCs' auto-attack (such as Midgardsormr) or getting hit (such as The Griffin) are strangely high.
- Money sound when buying/selling items considerably loud.

I had no audio stuttering problem of any kind at any time before 6.0.1. Now, after 6.0.1, I'm having the same stuttering problem as countless others during combat with normal settings. I also always get it for a few seconds upon logging into an inn room, oddly enough. Changing bit rate and/or hz does nothing at all, nor muting & unmuting Master Volume or muting Ambient Sounds. I never get an FPS drop during it.

The only thing that seems to affect it is setting Listening Position to 100 (not even 95, but 100), and even then it's not a 100% fix; stuttering can still crop up sometimes but much less often then. However, such a setting is naturally uncomfortable and not a solution. Moving camera around so you don't see as many things also seems to affect it. With 6.0.1, I do hear the weaponskill combo sound again, but it's a little quieter than it should be, which implies the intrinsic root cause of the issue is not dealt with.

It seems what someone said in a Reddit thread is the key: It has to do with how many objects are between you and your target or the source. ALL signs point to the awful Spatial Audio as the cause, or more specifically, the engine being changed to support it. It all feels at least a tiny bit weird and just off, honestly, even when it is working.

Please, for the love of god, get rid of Spatial Audio so you can go back to 5.5 sound engine. The game is ruined at its BEST time. To say this is not good is the biggest understatement one could make about FFXIV. If nothing else, please undo whatever was done in 6.0.1 because that only made it worse, or in my case, actually added the stuttering when I had none anywhere before. I'm begging you.


And my second post from the other thread:

To follow up, I'm happy to say that two times now, I've not gotten any audio stuttering whatsoever in the final dungeon of Endwalker. However, I did get it in the second-to-last dungeon of Endwalker, The Weeping City of Mhach, The Final Steps of Faith, and Alphascape 2.0. I really can't explain it. I originally assumed I got no stuttering in the final dungeon because the environment there may have slightly less simultaenous objects than other dungeons, but Final Steps of Faith and Alphascape 2.0 are just as relatively sparse. I really don't get it.

Please. Just go back to 5.5's sound engine. Please.

[Maeklos]

To follow up, I'm happy to say that two times now, I've not gotten any audio stuttering whatsoever in the final dungeon of Endwalker. However, I did get it in the second-to-last dungeon of Endwalker, The Weeping City of Mhach, The Final Steps of Faith, and Alphascape 2.0. I really can't explain it. I originally assumed I got no stuttering in the final dungeon because the environment there may have slightly less simultaenous objects than other dungeons, but Final Steps of Faith and Alphascape 2.0 are just as relatively sparse. I really don't get it.

Please. Just go back to 5.5's sound engine. Please.

Yeah. I swapped to another character that I've been futzing around on with a friend (playing through the ARR story with them since they've come over as a Trial, but they're on hiatus now because of the queues). I've been standing in DPS queues as a level 53 Samurai, so getting some pretty basic dungeons/trials. Leviathan had no issues. Ifrit had no issues. Then I hop on my chocobo to ride to a FATE and as soon as I got on my chocobo, the sound broke and is now completely borked.

It seems as if everything is fine until -something happens- and then that just completely screws up the sound. Occasionally, it will fix itself (temporarily), but often it won't. So.... <shrugs>

[Lagunow]

A question for the more hardware savvy:

If I swap the output driver from realtek to HDMI, would the audio be handled by the GPU instead?

If that was the case, wouldn't it theoretically solve the issue if I try to output the audio through the HDMI port and let the GPU handle the audio instead of using the motherboard P2/USB ports?

That's just something that crossed my mind though, I'm not knowledgeable about these specifics.

[Maeklos]

A question for the more hardware savvy:

If I swap the output driver from realtek to HDMI, would the audio be handled by the GPU instead?

If that was the case, wouldn't it theoretically solve the issue if I try to output the audio through the HDMI port and let the GPU handle the audio instead of using the motherboard P2/USB ports?

That's just something that crossed my mind though, I'm not knowledgeable about these specifics.

Funnily enough, someone posted this on my Petition thread (that got moved to General Discussion):

So, interesting side note, though I don't know if it'll help anyone else or not.

I run FFXIV's audio output manually redirected onto a pure-software sound device (a "virtual audio cable"); I've done this for ages, mostly so that I can capture the audio in OBS for streaming separately from any Windows system sounds, but it also allows me to swap the audio output around (using the 'Listen' tab of the VAC's device entry to have it output onto my headphones or my normal speakers).

The other day, I accidentally blew away those settings and FFXIV was playing audio directly onto my sound device... and I started having this audio issue. When I restored my VAC settings and forced FFXIV's audio through a virtual cable again, the issues stopped.

The problem is 100% in the game engine, but it seems like maybe it's some sort of timing-dependent thing, and that pure-software solutions like the Virtual Audio Cable stuff are not subject to this particular wonkiness? I haven't dug deeply, regardless, I just know it did fix things for me. I don't know if it'll work the same for anyone else, but it can't hurt to try?

There are multiple virtual audio cable options out there; if anyone else wants to try my specific setup and see if it fixes things for them, the one I used in this case was VB-Audio's. They offer one cable free, and then additional driver packs to add more cables are paid; the freebie cable pack would, I figure, be enough for someone else to test this as well.

If anyone else does try this, I'd be curious to know what the result is. I'm assuming that the virtual cable fixed the issue in my case (because it went away when I swapped back to using the cable), but it could hypothetically be pure coincidence.