Audio popping issue

[EvilCoatrack]

Just stumbled on this thread and wanted to chime in because I am apparently the Intel unicorn here. Just built a new system tonight with a brand new 12th Gen Intel(R) Core i5-12600k. Audio drivers updated (from Gigabyte's driver site for my exact motherboard). Graphics drivers updated (GeForce RTX 3080).

Ran a Trust dungeon to test things and audio started stuttering about 5-seconds into a 4-mob pack. Graphics were fine. Turned sound off and did some troubleshooting and, after nothing simple worked, I "solved" it by signing up for the Immerse Spatial Audio trial and enabling it. Instantly fixed the stuttering.

Re-ran the dungeon toggling it on and off to see its affect on my CPU. With ISA on (no stuttering) CPU utilization was steady at around 20% in combat, lower out of combat. Turning ISA off in combat caused immediate stuttering and CPU utilization climbed to 25%. Too bad that the sound effects sound worse with ISA than they did on my 3-year-old rig.

I'm not going to go out of my way yet to find some crazy hardware/software setting fix to get around this.

EDIT: Getting the latest Windows 10 version updated (something I was struggling with last night and hadn't done before logging in to FFXIV) appears to have fixed my stuttering without needing to use ISA.