Audio popping issue

[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.

[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.

[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.

[ChilledApple]

So i just created a profile for the forums so that i can bump this one up. Already filed a bug report today and responded to the twitter message of Embody. I tried now everything that there is. I am suffering from this issue since day one, i had plenty of time to troubleshoot and try different things, nothing worked so far. Although i downloaded the audio pack today and created a profile. At first ... no diffrence. I then started to play a little bit with my settings. I changed the audio quality to 16 bit 44100 Hz, capped my fps to 60 and set listening position to 0. That "fixed" the stuttering for the most part. Previous to those changes i got constant stuttering in certain dungeons and dutys. The last turn of the new Raid was espacially bad.

But the real problem here is: why the hell do i have to get that audio pack, for wich i have to pay, just to be able to play the game? And altough it "fixes" most of my stuttering problems now, the audio pack itself is utter garbage. The quality is so bad, just as everyone stated, it sounds all muffled and off.

I just hope that Square realises sooner than later, how many people are actually affected.

*edit* Ah and i still can recreate the issue in the rising stone instance. I have no idea why its so bad in there but just standing still in the instance makes the audio stutter. If you spam a few AoEs it goes totally crazy.

[Maeklos]

I just hope that Square realises sooner than later, how many people are actually affected.

Yeah. I still don't understand why they pulled down the entire working sound engine from Shadowbringers to do this. If this were, say, a new graphics layer for updated shadows or lightsourcing or something, you can guarantee that it would be an additional option, not a complete rework of the entire graphics engine for one new feature. Especially if that feature is something sold by a third party developer. I've never worked in software design, but I have worked for almost two decades in business and sales, and the one thing you absolutely, positively never want to do is to tie the success of your product onto a third-party product. Because if that third-party product fails or compromises your product, all of your hard work is for nothing. Your work is screwed over, all because someone outside of your company screwed up or didn't put in enough due diligence.

[Midare]

I've been following this thread since my first post and the responses have been... disappointing, specially as it's starting to remind me of certain other company which I used to consume products from and it's leaving a real bad taste in my mouth.
I get the situation it's different, in this case this info, I imagine, doesn't go unfiltered to the devs due to the language barrier, but clearly, those who are filtering seem to be filtering a little too much.

I've been pondering a lot about this, the responses, the "fixes" (which I still attempt from time to time even if I know it won't work), and during one of those moments of pondering I remembered about the situation SE dealt with at the beginning of this year with a different game: Nier Automata.
I don't know how many here know or heard of this incident, but when the glaring flaws of this game's PC port became more evident due to it being released in the Game Pass, there was only one thing that pushed SE to fix the PC port. I'm implying this rather than outright saying it because, well, this is literally my second post ever here (I wasn't expecting to even make a forum profile to begin with) so I don't know about what I can say but yeah, this is just an idea that came to mind. Perhaps a similar thing will be more helpful than any bug report at this point.

[Maeklos]

I've been following this thread since my first post and the responses have been... disappointing, specially as it's starting to remind me of certain other company which I used to consume products from and it's leaving a real bad taste in my mouth.
I get the situation it's different, in this case this info, I imagine, doesn't go unfiltered to the devs due to the language barrier, but clearly, those who are filtering seem to be filtering a little too much.

I've been pondering a lot about this, the responses, the "fixes" (which I still attempt from time to time even if I know it won't work), and during one of those moments of pondering I remembered about the situation SE dealt with at the beginning of this year with a different game: Nier Automata.
I don't know how many here know or heard of this incident, but when the glaring flaws of this game's PC port became more evident due to it being released in the Game Pass, there was only one thing that pushed SE to fix the PC port. I'm implying this rather than outright saying it because, well, this is literally my second post ever here (I wasn't expecting to even make a forum profile to begin with) so I don't know about what I can say but yeah, this is just an idea that came to mind. Perhaps a similar thing will be more helpful than any bug report at this point.

One thing to remember: FF14 and Nier Automata aren't created by the same companies. Square Enix is the big corporation, yes but Creative Business Unit III does FF14, while PlatinumGames does Nier.

[Midare]

Oh I know, they only published it, and I won't claim to know how much power a publisher has over the development of a game, I have absolutely no idea.

But the fact of the matter is that people did what they did, and the issue got patched.

[Grimno]

The fact this was tweeted

"The Community team will be AFK until Jan. 4, 2022! Person running
We've got some posts lined up and helpers keeping an eye out for issues... but we'll probably still pop in from time to time anyway!"

has me believing a lot of Square will be closed for the Holidays for a while, which I mean, that's expected.
But this I assume means it'll be a week or so more before we hear of anything if we do hear of anything...