Audio popping issue

[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.

[Vimak-Areseia]

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).

Don't make blanket statements like this! One post above yours I detail how I happened to get this bug ever since 6.01 came out, and guess what... I have a AMD Phenom II X6.

[Cornet]

I thought I'd come back with more of my own experimentation. I'd started to try to write a bug report, but I realized there was some things I hadn't tried yet that I probably really should first, since I'm sitting here with such an ancient CPU, I want to have all my ducks in a row so they don't laugh any report I make away. lol I've also mostly been testing in FATES, since they're quick to test. I really need to venture into more things. So, yeah, I'm not sure I'm any closer to making one yet... as my results have been as interesting as they are headscratching.

It was good few pages back so... I'm here with an Athlon II X4. Athlon II's are siblings to the Phenom cpus, the difference being they lack L3 cache. Mine's on the lower end, a 620 which sports only 2.6mhz (which prolly is bottlenecking my gtx 670 lol) That it's been doing so well with the game has been miraculous. I'm comfortably still in the 50-60 fps range most of the time, only few spots really tanking it. (Like, y'know, Limsa aetheryte plaza lmao)

I'd really had no troubles until the patch dropped. I do a fair bit of streaming, so I literally even have video in FATES before the patch with the audio all hunky dory, then after and the audio is stuttering horribly.

Initially I tried what everyone was talking about, priority in Task Manager and adjusting the audio quality and I tried swapping from the nvidia hdmi output to my onboard sound with some speakers... and the more I poked at these things, it just seemed to get WORSE somehow. Even on a clean boot, with every background thing closed. It was somehow now unbearable, even getting that crackling in the loading screen. So much I threw up my hands and plum did a restore point before the patch even... which by all rights shouldn't have done anything, but seemingly it reset to normal sucky again instead of ungodly bad.

Next, I decided I guess I really should try dx9... WELL. I didn't test long enough tbh... I prolly should try it a bit more, but I didn't notice any audio problems the few FATES I did, but it felt awful to play with my fps dropped drastically. I couldn't stand it, so I rebooted and set it back to dx11 and got back on.

...the stuttering somehow had lessened even more. Why? I have no idea. It really does not make a lick of sense. It didn't completely go. One fate would be fine, the next, it'd be there here and there. It really seems to depend on the sounds and how many are playing at the same time, from what I've experienced. The more sounds layering, the more it seems to have issue. Like I found a certain, uh, new cactuar has an attack that's VERY noisy, and dear god, does that cause stutter. Single combat? It's fine. But really does make you headscratch how then does issues pop up in the *loading screen*?

Around this time, I decided it was time I updated XIV on my lappy to see how it would do. My laptop is a MSI cx61... not specifically a gaming lappy, but it still sported a nvidia 640m and it has an i5 3210m 2.5mhz that turbos to 3.1. It's an 8-9 year old lappy now. I used to play a lot on it, but the gpu is struggling a bit more with the game these days, but yeah, it was hunky dory with the audio though. No stuttering at all.

So I went back to my desktop. I decided to yolo. (I do not recommend to anyone to try this, lemme make that clear right here. lol) I've pondered the idea of overclocking my cpu a little for awhile... it's meant to oc quite well, so I finally went for it. I didn't go remotely as far as it can potentially be nudged up to, but it's now happily sitting at 3.2mhz. I wanted to give this a shot cause I'd been watching Performance in Windows Task Manager and noticed when the stutters happened, it was making some REALLY huge cpu spikes, that were peaking to 100 usage.

Well. I played a bunch last night while in a Discord call, and... things seemed fine?! I didn't notice any stutter. I even set the objects number back to 'normal' over the change to 'low'. I haven't streamed yet, so that'll be the big test, but yeah. I'm not here suggesting remotely that WELL THAT FIXED THAT, cause watch, knowing my luck, I'll play today and it'll come back. lol

SO yeah. It's so baffling and curious... especially how all you with FX cpus are having even more problems then our Phenom/Athlon II chips. (It seems a bit like FX chips are having their own particular issue... I've yet to see any audio issues in cutscenes, for example.) Not to mention the many other types of cpus that are having issues too. I also can't figure out how such silly things as swapping to dx9 then back to dx11 could possibly change anything. That makes 0 sense. Unexplainable oddities aside, it does feel a bit like though the changes to audio just aren't... well optimized perhaps? Like for not having spatial audio enabled, why is the audio spiking the cpu? But Idk. Just musings. These are things only SE can figure out and I'm an artist, not a programmer. lmao

[XenophineEX]

I also have this issue. If I do not keep the audio 100% on character it only makes it worse. It isn't clicking or popping though... it is like someone is turning the sound on and off rapidly. For cutscenes I fixed the voiced parts by switching to Japanese voice. Turned objects to minimum, and windows to 10 only helped with initial stuttering when teleporting to a dense city. Anywhere around camp dragonhead, if you engage with the enemy in the snow it always happens, the stuttering that would make you think your pc is going to explode, yet everything on screen is running at a constant 60 fps. The only fix I have right now is to simply turn my speakers off when it happens in a fight. Which also affords me the opportunity to see it is not my hardware. Playing soundless with zero frame lagging or any type of in game visual stutter pins this squarely (pun slightly intended) on the new in game audio engine.

*edit*
I would also like to add this problem became to the point I had to voice input on it after this latest patch. 6.01 to be exact. It was occurring during 6.0 but fiddling with settings fixed it. As of 6.01 the sound files themselves sound like they are corrupted. Case in point the base in revenants toll within the base will play its music smoothly till certain sections of the song, then will always start stuttering at the same points with nothing else or anything taxing happening on the screen. Mayhap the sound files themselves they are pulling from are... "damaged".

[GorthRedsteel]

I'm a time traveler from the future and bring you the official response from Square Enix regarding this sound issue:
"just stop being poor and buy better hardware lol"

[polyphanes]

Also, in addition to my technical concerns from earlier in the thread, I'd also like to point out and echo the sentiment of others: this audio issue is severely dampening my desire to play FFXIV, which is disappointing and troubling.

- If I play as-is, the audio stuttering is so bad that I either develop severe headaches or am forced to play the game on mute.

- If I play with the Immerse Gamepack for FFXIV, not only does audio stutering still persist in many fights (especially non non-Standard equalizer modes) albeit at a somewhat reduced level, but the spatialization feels unnatural, unintuitive, and nausea-inducing, which also forces me to play the game on mute.

- If I play the game on mute, well...that's a solid half of the entire experience, plus a variety of mechanics-based and player-based sound cues, that I'm missing out on. It's a depressing experience.

This is a bad issue to have on all fronts, and it's getting to the point where I'd rather not play the game at all than have a continuously bad and frustrating experience with the game.