Quote Originally Posted by Lagunow View Post
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):

Quote Originally Posted by Packetdancer View Post
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.