Audio popping issue

[Grimno]

This is an excellent find! I can confirm I have the same thing happening: the visual alert signals also reflect stuttered/slowed-down audio. On the one hand, this is troubling, since I was already hoping to use visual alerts to get by to rely on something resembling audio cues without having to listen to headache-inducing audio, but if that's *also* being affected, then determining patterns and getting used to it may also be affected. On the other hand, it *is* evidence that this is being produced and used by FFXIV within FFXIV, and not something that FFXIV is itself feeding into (like an external sound driver or something).

But also, it's interesting how different things, while getting stuttered, slow down at different rates. Some things just get choppy in order to keep up with all the stuff that happens, but other sounds (like the BGM) just get slowed down for the duration of the stutter without trying to "catch up" with what we'd expect on a system that doesn't have such issues.

Agreed. That is an excellent find from Maeklos. Shows us with visual proof that it's indeed something on Square's end.

[Rannzyr]

I've found all the new classes with super aoe seem to trigger sound stuttering. You would be hard pressed to find a tank that only does 3 at a time. 100% of the ones I have encountered even with 2 dragoons with limited aoe, run about gathering half the dungeon only to then have the sound cut out horribly. And then have the fight take 4x longer than it should.

Too many WoW refugee's, they are adopting their old methods in a new game; And it is breaking it.

Don't even try to tell them to slow down either, the tank will proclaim he is the only dps needed. And you will forfeit your commendations. Just stay silent, and deal with the fallout.

With all due respect your subjective opinion doesn't really matter.

Wow refugees are not causing this issue, rushed implementation of a flawed sound engine is.

Square enix are 100% responsible for this and your shouldn't try to place blame on players you personally dislike. We can only wait and hope this gets sorted but it probably won't any time soon because it's not an easy fix.

Well, it could be if they bothered to actually let us toggle it but the new deal must have been good

[raelgun]

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.

I am also curious to how people are running their audio out as well.

directly from the onboard solution - which I am guessing is most of the case here.

Are people running any USB connected devices such as USB headsets, USB powered headphone amps or a USB audio interface (those running a mixer directly from the onboard is still onboard).

Might be worth if people haven't tried to see if messing with the bit rate and sample rate on their audio settings and see if that alleviates things.

I don't get any popping issues with or without the Embody immersion setting on, I do run the game through a USB audio interface.

For sake of clarity my CPU is a Ryzen 5900X so stupidly high end however looking at reports with people with modern CPUs and I think I've seen some posts with the Ryzen 5600X.

Though my post doesn't provide a solution, it might help with narrowing down further any culprits.

[Grimno]

I am also curious to how people are running their audio out as well.

directly from the onboard solution - which I am guessing is most of the case here.

Are people running any USB connected devices such as USB headsets, USB powered headphone amps or a USB audio interface (those running a mixer directly from the onboard is still onboard).

Might be worth if people haven't tried to see if messing with the bit rate and sample rate on their audio settings and see if that alleviates things.

I don't get any popping issues with or without the Embody immersion setting on, I do run the game through a USB audio interface.

For sake of clarity my CPU is a Ryzen 5900X so stupidly high end however looking at reports with people with modern CPUs and I think I've seen some posts with the Ryzen 5600X.

Though my post doesn't provide a solution, it might help with narrowing down further any culprits.

So my Audio is a bit funky.
I guess something happened with my motherboard so trying to run audio directly from the green port in the back does -not- work. There's no audio at all no matter what I've tried from reinstalling sound drivers and more.
So I had to plug in a Roccat JUKE into the USB in the back, and then plug the audio port into that which allowed me to have audio.
So my audio isn't plugged into the motherboard's sound plug directly, but instead plugged in through the USB port.

[ChilledApple]

So, after the fight, I decided to go into Accessibility Settings and found the Visual Alerts option. I turned this on. For those who have never used this (as I hadn't), this basically puts equalizer bars on both sides of your screen that show the sound being played in the game. Unlike nearly every other game I've ever played, FF14 does not actually switch the sound "off" then you mute it or turn it off. You can turn Master Volume down to 0 AND mute it and all of the sound effects will keep playing. You just aren't hearing them. I guess is because it needs those effects, music, etc, for the visual alert system?

Anyway. Getting back to my point. The visual alerts. They show the distorted audio. That means that it's actually conclusive proof that it's Final Fantasy itself that's causing these problems, since if it were feeding "clean" audio out of the game and it was our computers mucking it up, then FF should show "clean" visual cues. Not the distorted ones. That means that FF itself is aware of the issues, which wouldn't be the case if the problem was in the game audio being pumped into our system.

At least, so it seems to me.

EDIT: Interestingly, if I mute master volume, the visual cues still show distorted audio. I can tell because whenever I cast Dyskrasia, if it doesn't distort, I get a clean, single push out on the bottom-most equalizer bar. When it's distorted, that bar will push out and bounce a few times before going down. With the sound muted, I'm still getting the bounce 2 out of 3 casts.

Tried that today aswell, its the same for me here. It's a little bit funny that you can visualize the issue. Welp guess i have to keep playing with the audio pack for a while. My poor ears T_T

[raelgun]

So my Audio is a bit funky.
I guess something happened with my motherboard so trying to run audio directly from the green port in the back does -not- work. There's no audio at all no matter what I've tried from reinstalling sound drivers and more.
So I had to plug in a Roccat JUKE into the USB in the back, and then plug the audio port into that which allowed me to have audio.
So my audio isn't plugged into the motherboard's sound plug directly, but instead plugged in through the USB port.

USB soundcards is something I probably should of added ( I tend to class them as audio interface for some reason ), USB audio devices tend to do more of the onboard processing and ignores more of the CPU or anything onboard for the matter to process the audio signal.

If you play around with the bit rate and sample rate, does that impact anything for you?

[Grimno]

USB soundcards is something I probably should of added ( I tend to class them as audio interface for some reason ), USB audio devices tend to do more of the onboard processing and ignores more of the CPU or anything onboard for the matter to process the audio signal.

If you play around with the bit rate and sample rate, does that impact anything for you?

Nope. I have the Spatial Audio Pack downloaded for the trial and it does help (though combat sounds muffled) but doesn't get rid of the audio crackling 100%
I'll still hear it sometimes in enclosed spaces, or during loading screens between zones. Though I can play Reaper now without crackling. Just ran the Grimlyt Dark dungeon without any crackles as reaper.

[Mousezilla]

I'm at that one level 88 quest in zone one (the one with the crying, you know what I'm talking about) and I have to put a pin in the MSQ until this issue gets resolved. Not only is Soken's music too good to turn off, but I rely a lot on sound queues for fights, which is unfortunately where the stuttering issue is the absolute worst. I can work on crafting and gathering and older content, but I can't do any roulettes that put me in the new content where I'm not familiar enough to manage without the sounds, or risk the glitch deciding to branch out into the voiced cutscenes. Like everyone else here, I didn't have this issue prior to 6.0, and it became impossible to ignore after 6.01 dropped.

You guys know I love and appreciate your hard work, and I've come to the forums to complain maybe twice in the... dear god, 8 years? Jesus. The probably-way-too-long time I've been playing. But this third-party sound software was a frankly iffy idea that maybe should have waited to be implemented sometime not during a huge launch when you would have had more eyes and hands free to catch this before it went FUBAR.

[Breezelyn]

Catching up on reading the thread, I decided to try what Maeklos did, because I rely on audio cues as well for boss fights. Including when I usually run heals, the audio cue for the big stack markers gets me ready for big heals. It's not much better, but... ugh. The audio stuttering has given me a migraine I can't get rid of. I'm on day 3 of having it, and it's NOT fun over the holidays. I took a break from the game most of the last night.

I just wish their damn sound engine was tested BEFORE they put it into the game. The benchmark would have been the best option to do it with. I just feel a bit duped with the game currently. I paid 40 USD for the expansion, then 15 USD a month (plus extra retainers on top of that). Just to have this game-breaking, audio stutter persisting to who-knows-when making it hard to actually do much. I'm just tired of getting headaches and migraines from something they could prevented. You know, TESTED before they released it into the actual game, and now, players/customers are paying for the consequences...literally.

Before anyone gets on me about this: We are paying real life money to play this game. It's NOT F2P where you can play without having to buy/pay for a cent to have access to said game. I love this game-- I want to be happy playing it. I've been with this mmo for a long while. Just this audio stutter is starting to affect me in real life at this point. If it's not fixed by next month before Savage, I don't know what I'm going to do.

[MoonstalkerZ]

Anyway. Getting back to my point. The visual alerts. They show the distorted audio. That means that it's actually conclusive proof that it's Final Fantasy itself that's causing these problems, since if it were feeding "clean" audio out of the game and it was our computers mucking it up, then FF should show "clean" visual cues. Not the distorted ones. That means that FF itself is aware of the issues, which wouldn't be the case if the problem was in the game audio being pumped into our system.

This is a HUGE clue. If you haven't already, put this in the bug report, the devs need to see this.

I also encourage everyone to test this for yourselves, put it in your own bug reports, and make videos if that's within your abilities. The more proof we can gather, the quicker this gets fixed.