Audio popping issue

[TojiSuzuhara]

to be fair, they could just post an announcement on the lodestone for that, but i guess they dont want bad press on their homepage since they push all these new shiny "audio tools"

Iam happy that its getting fixed now so i dont rly care.

i think its that and the fact that this is most likely considered a "fringe" issue. its nice knowing i wasn't crazy and the only one having this problem, but i've just accepted the fact that more ppl would need to be experiencing this for them to acknowledge it "officially" on the lodestone

[ClaraKitty]

asked the Legend Soken directly himself on twitter and he responded saying they are planning to have this fixed BEFORE 6.1. As frustrating as this issue is, i have nothing but respect that a lead developer goes out of their way to respond to people personally like this. Crossing my fingers this gets fixed asap

https://twitter.com/SOKENsquareenix/...54502893629443

hopefully this helps alleviate fears

That's fantastic! That's all we wanted to hear.

My husband hasn't had this issue at all and his PC is older than mine, so he's been hoping it gets fixed for my sake.

[Artemicion]

Yes, this is probably a bit off-topic, but here goes briefly. It's literally just pressing the big 'Play' button in Steam, so it's super easy. And for the standalone version, it's 'fairly' easy if you're willing to copy paste some commands into the terminal But it's possible not everything will go smoothly.

However, if you do get it all working, there's the added benefit of no crackling sound bugs already! Also possibly better performance on most rigs, but this should be nominal and YMMV.

Back to the topic at hand, it would be great if some Windows user could test the exclusive mode and priority in the soundcard settings effect? I don't have Windows since a couple years now, so can't test this. Apologies if this has been tried already in this 100+ page thread! It's just that this fixes it in Linux, so I thought something similar would help in Windows too.

I have "Allow apps to take exclusive control of device" selected, but not "Give exclusive mode apps priority" and DO experience stuttering. I'll tick the priority option as well and try it out this evening.

[Puss_Kat]

Does anyone know if FFXIV on Windows can take exclusive control of the soundcard? Has anyone tried and tested to check that box in sound card properties?

I know there's a fix coming, but I'm just wondering if this could be fixed for Windows users ahead of time already, as it is for Linux users

it opens a shared session only.

[rojimboo]

I have "Allow apps to take exclusive control of device" selected, but not "Give exclusive mode apps priority" and DO experience stuttering. I'll tick the priority option as well and try it out this evening.

it opens a shared session only.

Damn, that's unfortunate. If FFXIV doesn't take exclusive control, then this fix doesn't work on Windows one last thing to try would be to disable all other sound devices with those two tickboxes on. Having multiple sound devices on, FFXIV might not activate exclusive mode (if it ever would).

Regardless, exclusive mode means no other app can produce sound, or take input. So no discord voice chat whilst gaming for example. It doesn't bother me, but it would many. So the fix is definitely welcome and luckily will come soon!

[Puss_Kat]

the issue really has nothing to do with what windows is doing with the audio, or the driver for that matter, its all a performance issue / lack of engine optimization where more Sounds are being rendered than should be causing a process bottleneck where graphics and audio are competing for cpu time.

[rojimboo]

the issue really has nothing to do with what windows is doing with the audio, or the driver for that matter, its all a performance issue / lack of engine optimization where more Sounds are being rendered than should be causing a process bottleneck where graphics and audio are competing for cpu time.

Sure, but if there's no software resampling on the CPU, and the soundcard is matching the source samplerate, then the CPU does very little and there should be no/less stuttering. I imagine that's why I got it working in Linux with alsa (exclusive mode), and not the software resampling Pulseaudio.

I mean, it *could* be other reasons too, like CPU scheduler is better optimised on Linux, but then that wouldn't explain how switching to ALSA fixes it.

Regardless, if FFXIV doesn't allow exclusive control of the soundcard, there's no way to verify.

[Larirawiel]

It can be that Linux can handle the specialties of Bulldozer CPUs better and the issue does not occur very often. As i wrote, Bulldozer is very different to other CPUs. I can imagine that Microsoft will not support this CPU type explicitely because it is an old CPU and AMD could not sell many CPUs because Intel was way better at this time.

Cheers

[rojimboo]

It can be that Linux can handle the specialties of Bulldozer CPUs better and the issue does not occur very often. As i wrote, Bulldozer is very different to other CPUs. I can imagine that Microsoft will not support this CPU type explicitely because it is an old CPU and AMD could not sell many CPUs because Intel was way better at this time.

Cheers

It's possible. But I have a Ryzen 3700X zen2 processor, though.

Does the audio crackling happen to most people, or is it just for a fraction? And people with Bulldozer CPUs are all/mostly affected? Those AMD processors had notoriously poor single-thread performance, perhaps not dealing with CPU latency very well for audio.

[AeroXaia]

I've had it set to allow exclusive mode and to give priority, with all other playback devices disabled all along, so no luck there.

For Linux to handle something game related better than windows is certainly a first for me though, really interesting. (Not to mention on a game built for windows!) Maybe the move off the sinking ship might be sooner than I thought.