Audio popping issue

[Breezelyn]

Just made my bug report. Please everyone make a report if you can.. including if you have a pc was that built within the last year or this current year. Prove that it's on SE's end.

[EvilKiwi]

Submitted a report ... Started to have the problems in cutscenes now and I am severely annoyed and frustrated.

[MiaShino]

For anyone running on older hardware, do not feel bad or pressured to upgrade because of this peculiar issue.

Despite highly specific shortcomings the FX series, especially FX-8350 is more then capable of running FF14 or most anything provided you are not attempting to push 120+ Hertz.

These older cpus are actually significantly more powerful then what you shall find in the PS4 and even PS4 Pro. I am confident enough in stating this that am willing to bet you could achieve stable frame rates on a Core2Quad. You should never experience severe stuttering even when frame rate is unstable, that is purpose of buffering audio. Extensive work goes into insuring this from myriad of developers working on emulators ranging from Dolphin to Dosbox to PCem...

Example; Partner achieves stable frame rate (60 fps) on one old Phenom II x2 with two unlocked cores. Yes this was thing, old non quad core Phenom processors can have cores unlocked turning dual core into quad core. Fun times! My partner does not suffer from audio stuttering.

[Lagunow]

I was planning to upgrade my PC when the semiconductor crisis is solved.

Nowadays I only play FFXIV and a few indie games on PC, so I'm no particular hurry to upgrade. FFXIV always ran so smooth at 60 fps until 5.5 and it still does.

When they announced the spatial audio plugin I had no idea it would require them to upgrade the sound engine in such a way that my current setup could no longer support.

[MoonstalkerZ]

Did some testing fighting mobs in the Black Shroud. I was fighting a single mob, and two other mobs were in the background. I was the only player on screen. Fighting the single mob with my basic 1-2-3 attack, while facing away from the camera and with my character between the camera and the mob, produced awful stuttering. Without moving the camera at all, I ran behind the mob so that the mob was between the camera and my character, and turned around so that my character was facing the camera. Now my 1-2-3 attack produced no stuttering at all. I switched positions several times, always with the same result.

The only things that changed in this situation were 1) which direction my character was facing, and 2) whether my character was between the camera and the mob or not. Everything that was on screen while the stuttering was horrible was also on screen while the stuttering was nonexistent. No computer settings or hardware changed between the two situations. The problem was entirely caused by the position of my character relative to the mob and/or which direction he was facing. If the stuttering was caused by having insufficient processing power, I doubt simply moving my character two feet forward and turning him around would somehow reduce the processing power required.

There is also the consideration that people with much more powerful processors than I have are hearing worse stuttering than I am - for me the problem doesn't happen with every fight, and I can always fix it by running behind the mob and facing the camera, though of course this usually isn't a practical solution. Meanwhile, people with more powerful processors are apparently unable to alleviate the problem at all, or the camera fix only works momentarily.

I'm not going to deny that the game needs sufficient processing power to run properly, to claim otherwise would be ridiculous. But I'm getting sound bugs after a major change to the sound system, in an area from 2012 that runs at 100 fps, bugs that are worse for people with better cpus, bugs that can be alleviated by slightly changing the position of my character while changing nothing else - if that's 100% caused by not having enough processing power, I'll eat my hat.

[Maeklos]

I'm not going to deny that the game needs sufficient processing power to run properly, to claim otherwise would be ridiculous. But I'm getting sound bugs after a major change to the sound system, in an area from 2012 that runs at 100 fps, bugs that are worse for people with better cpus, bugs that can be alleviated by slightly changing the position of my character while changing nothing else - if that's 100% caused by not having enough processing power, I'll eat my hat.

It is 100% caused by the positional audio rework in the new sound engine.

[XenophineEX]

It is 100% caused by the positional audio rework in the new sound engine.

It is exactly what this person stated. Forcing us to listen to "3d" while in stereo is causing areas of our audio to drop between left and right channels, as they have added 3 more, back left, back right, and center. They seem to have neglected "stereo" altogether and figure we will all use surround sound.

*edit*
Make no mistake though, enabling virtualized surround only makes the problem worse. Instead of switching to center it just mutes the sound, it will sound like whispering in the left and right channels. Stuttering whispering. And the fact remains the music always stutters at the exact same points regardless of what is happening. Which indicates to me they corrupted their entire musical and sound library to force this unwelcome change on us. Apart from rechecking hash on your downloaded files... the original sources are now corrupted so you can re-download the game 1000 times, just to have the same results. Until Square Enix fixes the original source files for audio it is doomed to stutter.

[Vimak-Areseia]

I would like to add something, I havent read all the comments in this 54 page thread, but I've been playing Endwalker since Early Access... playing it up till last Tuesday (12/21) and I had literally 0 problems with the audio, not a stutter, not a pop, nothing. I did ALL kinds of content, from dungeon grinding as a Reaper on launch, to watching all the MSQ cutscenes and doing all the trials-- nothing of the sort.

Patch 6.01 comes out, the game sound stutters here and there, I don't pay too much mind... then I get to specifically the "Asphodelus: Fourth Circle" fight and that one... the music sounded SO crunchy, stuttering all of a sudden, no real FPS drops that would cause this, but I was stunned, I thought something was wrong with the specific song... but then I start doing different things and starting seeing no, its not just the one song.

I hope this a priority because-- even though my CPU is older, my game was working fine UNTIL whatever changes they tried to "fix" people's problems, making it worse for them and introducing it to others.

Hopefully this account helps and shows them that as much as it could be a hardware thing, it isn't fair if even someone that had no problem before got "introduced" the problem with an update-- seems like its completely avoidable if that's the case, doesn't it?

[-BlueGreen-]

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).

[MoonstalkerZ]

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).

I'm not even using the spatial audio, yet the game is apparently forcing my computer to process it anyway. I can get the option to turn off excess player models that I don't want to see to improve performance, why can't I get the option to turn off spatial audio processing that I'm not using to improve performance?

I also have the FX 4100, so it was very interesting to hear about all that from someone who seems to actually know something about how cpus work, thank you.