Audio popping issue

[Teiren]

So I said I'd post every duty that it happens in, but it's been happening regularly enough now even with Listening Position at 100 that I would go crazy if I did that. It'd now make more sense to list what duties it didn't occur in with Listening Position at 100.

And indeed, reading that quoted post was VERY interesting:

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 took a look at FFXIV's CPU usage when stuttering was happening (Intel i7-920, 2.67 GHz), and I noticed it would go to about 40-50, when normal usage is about 18-25. However, I wasn't getting FPS drops. So this must be what's happening for me. It also seems to happen more often around Sage actions, but then not always. Maybe Dancer too, can't really tell. One thing that I think has helped me a little is changing Battle Effects to Limited or None. This is inexplicably found in Character Configuration->Control Settings->Character tab. This is incredibly undesirable, but I can at least tolerate Limited for Party and None for Others, for now.

However, my biggest problem is that even when it's not stuttering, even if that is fixed, the audio is still wrong. All of the audio is just off, and it's not the fault of anyone's computer. It's just that the sound engine is incredibly poor and playing it all wrong. I don't know what much else to say about that. The sound engine was perfect in Shadowbringers, then plain ruined in Endwalker. I simply didn't realize it until I started doing pre-Endwalker duties again and hearing how obviously wrong it all is, such as in the Nier raids. This isn't some hard-to-grasp issue at all. You can hear it extremely easily on any computer. Even when the audio's working, it's just very obviously wrong in 6.0.

And I take back my concern that Endwalker's audio is unique to this sound engine and so they literally can't revert to 5.5. The benchmark proves that's false because it had plenty of Endwalker audio in it and it was very obviously on the same, good old sound engine that worked perfectly. So there should be absolutely no way that the 5.5 sound engine can't be provided for us, the players, in Endwalker. And if the response is that it can't be an option due to technical reasons, we will know something went very seriously wrong because the benchmark was fine.