Audio popping issue

[Au-ro]

To follow up on my previous post. I played for a few hours after reducing in game fps to 15. It brought my issues more in line with what others have described. Fps drops are almost non existent but I still hear the audio stuttering. Having the camera face my toons back starts the stuttering. Keeping the mob between the camera and my character stops the stuttering. I also have listening position and all other audio settings at 100. Was able to do quite a bit of msq with almost no issue. Hopefully this will help others with the fps drops.

[Nisava]

Nice to see acknowledgement finally! Makes me a bit irritated that they're telling us to try things a majority of us already have, but it checks out. Just really really hope this gets resolved asap.. trying to stay positive about it. Still think it was super irresponsible to launch their paid audio service at the same time as an entire expansion. We shouldn't have to pay a fee for working audio on top of our sub.

Here's to an eventual fix, & hopefully, our chance to enjoy Endwalker to it's fullest. Cheers.

[Kaedaemicis]

I have found turning "Ambient Sounds" to 0% fixes the problem for me. Try giving it a shot and see if it helps.

[Maeklos]

I have found turning "Ambient Sounds" to 0% fixes the problem for me. Try giving it a shot and see if it helps.

I tried this yesterday, but it doesn't work (for me, at least). It is 100% the positional audio. I can notice it when using Dyskrasia - the fact that each of those laser "hits" gets pinpointed all around my character causes the positional audio to crap out and break the entire sound engine after 2-3 casts at the very most.

[Kaedaemicis]

I'm sorry to hear that! It's been driving me craaazy until I tried the 0% ambient sound and mine seemed to work. Hope it gets resolved soon cause it's HIGHLY annoying.

[paga]

I have found turning "Ambient Sounds" to 0% fixes the problem for me. Try giving it a shot and see if it helps.

I think that actually fixed the problem for me. But mine was only minor so might not help for others. Thanks.

Edit: Yes can confirm that the ambient sounds are the problem for me, its especially bad when its raining. Issue started with 6.0.1 and I have a Ryzen 7 5600x if that helps. Temporary fix is okay but I really hope they can solve it quickly, especially for the ones who have it way worse.

[Elliah-Seraheart]

I think that actually fixed the problem for me. But mine was only minor so might not help for others. Thanks.

Edit: Yes can confirm that the ambient sounds are the problem for me, its especially bad when its raining. Issue started with 6.0.1 and I have a Ryzen 7 5600x if that helps. Temporary fix is okay but I really hope they can solve it quickly, especially for the ones who have it way worse.

I do not have any issues in combat or in towns etc. Cutscenes are ofc unwatchable though.
The funny thing is, whenever I MUTE the ambient, every single other audio channel freaks the fuck out indefinitely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYGu2rv3gbg&t=321s

[AeroXaia]

I do not have any issues in combat or in towns etc. Cutscenes are ofc unwatchable though.
The funny thing is, whenever I MUTE the ambient, every single other audio channel freaks the fuck out indefinitely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYGu2rv3gbg&t=321s

I've always played with ambient muted, unmuting it does help somewhat, however I still get the distortion sometimes. Turning it to zero also breaks it like muting, but with ambient sound on, when the sound breaks, it more often corrects itself or comes and goes, instead of staying broken forever (when I started the game with it already unmuted). Unmuting ambient sounds is helping much more than listening position.

The only things that have helped for me so far (without fully fixing it):

Ambient unmuted, volume not zero (Setting it to 1 seems to help as much as 100)
DX9 (Ew)
Listening position (Ew, I hate hearing the sounds from some other location than where I'm looking from)
Turning CPU power up (Ew, overheats room and blasts fan noise)

Yes, CPU is still affecting it. After 6.0.1 it didn't seem to help anymore, things just got worse and it wasn't enough to stop it. With ambient unmuted, it's often better but still gets bad sometimes in fights, and raising CPU again helps again, just like listening position helps. I get a realtime immediate reaction muting/unmuting ambient sounds, just like with adjusting CPU. (I'm not saying "get more CPU", I'm saying something is broken in a way that overwhelming CPU can partially compensate for, which is why I think you have less trouble than many of us, but something is still clearly wrong and shouldn't require so much CPU.)

I really don't want to have to use those settings and it's not entirely gone, something is still wrong here, and it's still worse than before 6.0 even with all of these settings. At least it's a lead and partial workaround for now.

[TojiSuzuhara]

I appreciate we finally get another response, albeit a tonedeaf one. We've already tried everything and the kitchen sink to fix this ourselves in terms of troubleshooting. What's even a little more disrespectful is basically the assumption that our computers can't handle it, when realistically if that were the case, this new "spatial audio" bs should have been in the Benchmark where had I at least noticed it then i would assume it was indeed a hardware issue. My only recommendation to people is to file a bug report both on here and in game because even though we got a response, i would not consider it as "it's being looked into" and they need to see mass reports of this to actually consider it something worth fixing.

[MiaShino]

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.