Audio popping issue

[RinKaenbyou]

They found out using Process Explorer and have been doing tests using it to see where CPU Usage spikes happen in combination with the sound issues. WinMM appears in the Thread stack while Xaudio no longer does when viewing the properties of ffxiv_dx11.exe via Process Explorer. As for DX9 stuff and XAudio, I'll have to get some answers for you on that when I can!

Speaking of which, further tests from them have found that muting sounds is actually raising CPU Usage which is something that shouldn't be happening. Their tests found that in Limsa with Ambient on and SFX off, CPU usage on the function likely causing the issues was 2.90%. With Ambient AND SFX Muted, CPU Usage on the likely offending function jumped to 7.36%. And with Ambient Muted and SFX Unmuted, CPU Usage for the offending function dropped to 1.55%.

Edit: Also yeah, removed the info from above post and put it here for better visibility and cause it was more relevant to the above message than in the original post.

Edit 2: A theory from my friend on CPU usage increase while muting audio. The audio effects are rendered even when muted, but then the engine has to selectively filter them out consuming a lot of extra cpu instead of just not rendering the sounds.

Edit 3: Got some DX9 info from my friend. They said that they are not sure about dx9. They've poked it a bit and it's not loading xaudio but its also not experiencing the issue. They said that it could be using WinMM and that there might be a bug in some function they've written that causes it to behave inversely on 64bit builds. Also, they shared the CPU Usage variables for Limsa they got while doing DX11 tests with sound muting which are as follows.

1.5 - 2.12% with nothing muted
1.5 - 3.4% with only Sound Effects Muted
1.3-2.75% with only Ambient Muted
6.0-7.5% with Ambient and Sound Effects muted.