Audio popping issue

[-BlueGreen-]

I've thrown everything I could think of at this, and nothing at all got rid of it. Some things certainly made the problem worse, but the best I managed to do was increase my FPS by around 50% (from ~100 FPS to ~150 FPS at least in the inn room, which is pretty cool, but did nothing for the sound issues).

I'll try to not go into too much detail, but here's the gist of what I tried (not in this order):

• Changing power settings (including the stuff from the Resheph's post)
• Disabling all Realtek hardware at the BIOS level that I could (both sound and ethernet in this case). I used a wifi card already installed to connect to the internet (I normally use the ethernet), and used a usb-based headset that counts as an external sound card for sound.
• Changing task priorities of both FFXIV and sound-related background services to both high and real time.
• Updated GPU driver.
• Updated Windows 10.
• Updated BIOS (I very strongly do not recommend anyone attempting this unless you're comfortable with messing with such settings. This reset some of my settings which made my desktop unbootable for a bit until I could restore the correct settings for my RAM).
• Switching from the Realtek HD Audio driver to the generic Windows one.
• Changing the sampling rate as officially recommended.
• Disabled virtual memory
• Changing vsync settings
• Changing refresh rate settings in game (setting it all the way down to 15 FPS mitigates it the most, but it's still there)
• Changing the listening position (though I recall this certainly making more of a difference before 6.01, it didn't seem to do much tonight)
• Disabled CPU throttling
• Reducing graphics quality (I normally run maximum or something very much like it, but I tested the standard laptop settings and noticed no real change other than the obvious leap in FPS)
• Using the DX9 client
• Disabling unused audio hardware (optical/digital audio ports and the GPU's audio driver that supports audio over the HDMI ports since I normally use analog speakers/headset)

I made some observations during my attempts:

• While stuttering seemed to happen in conjunction with FPS drops, after some of my earliest changes, the FPS drops no longer correlated with sound issues. I'd hear stuttering, but the system window would show FPS of >90 easily.
• For kicks, I re-ran the EW benchmark set to 1920x1080 Maximum and scored 8339 (High), which isn't bad for non-OC'd AMD FX-4100 (3.61Ghz) + GTX 1070ti combo. This certainly isn't a case of not meeting minimum specs for this game even after the update. (also, the benchmark had absolutely no audio issues)
• If the game was horribly stuttering and I logged out to the start screen, the start screen itself would stutter horribly all the way through choosing a character and waiting in queue. It's like it gets bogged down by something in game and likewise something in game will fix it from time to time, but the start/login screen seems incapable of impacting it.
• Even during the worst stuttering, all other applications (if I was running them concurrently during various tests) would sound perfectly normal. For instance, I was frequently carrying on a conversation over Discord with my wife during certain tests. I never heard any stuttering from the voice chat while the game stuttered away. I also tested playing some audio files which sounded perfectly fine, again even with stuttering from the game in the background.
• I even monitored CPU/GPU temperatures during some tests where I really played around with the in-game frame limit to switch between high/low frame rates while angling my camera such that stutter happened constantly and no matter the frame rate. I couldn't find any correlation between temperature and stuttering (just in case there was some hard throttling happening due to potentially exceeding thermal limits). I could get my system fairly hot, but not exceed the maximum operating temperatures, and clock rates remained at their expected values even at the highest temperatures I could manage to reach.

And for those hung up on "it's gotta be outdated/old hardware", here's a head scratcher: My wife runs a system with an AMD Phenom II X4 CPU and an even older GPU (iirc, a GTX 970, but I'd have to check to be sure). She hasn't had any sound issues at all even after 6.0's launch. As the usb-based headset belongs to her, she's even swapped between it and her speakers even with the game running (which, as I recall, used to cause sound to die completely before).

At this point, I've considered getting a discrete sound card to add to my system, but after testing the USB headset, that seems like it'd have no benefit as far as this particular issue goes. It's clear SE has made some change to the client that's causing this, and it's not because older/slower systems are suddenly bottlenecking on the latest graphics updates that came with 6.0, especially since any other audio will continue to play just fine alongside the stuttering game. What makes it illusive is that it seems to only happen to a specific set of hardware, not necessarily "older than X", like a problem with a specific CPU architecture.

For reference, my system:

• Motherboard: Asus M5A97
• CPU: AMD FX-4100 Quad-Core (3.61 Ghz)
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti
• RAM: 16.0GB DDR3 (1866 Mhz)

Edit: I just pulled the specs from my wife's system (remember, audio works perfectly for this one):

• Motherboard: msi 970A-G43
• CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 965 (3.40 Ghz)
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960
• RAM: 8.0GB DDR3 (1333 Mhz)

I also ran the benchmark on her system at 1600x900 Maximum and it scored 6049 (Fairly High).