Light buzzing PS4 only.

Question

Hi,

Recently our project has started exhibiting an occasional light short buzz/pop/glitch sound.  This seems to occur only on PS4, after attaching the tools to our project I don't see any errors.  Does anyone have any idea what may be causing this, too many events at once, stream starvation or missing assets.  How can I mitigate this issue?

 

Best,

 

Russ

Answer 1

Hi Russ,

A couple of PS4 specific things to check:

1. are you using an up to date version of wwise? a issue was found/fixed not too long ago addressing wwise not respecting some preferences that could lead to final buffer starvation on ps4 only

2. are you making heavy use of ATRAC9? if so experiment with another codec to see if this "fixes" your issue

3. what is the affinity mask of the event manager thread for you game on PS4? consider that CPU 7 functions similarly but differently from XB1

4. do you have any other large structural difference ( in actor-mixer hierarchy ) on PS4?

5. are you able to narrow down a branch of the voice graph where these artifacts occur in isolation? you can use the solo functionality in wwise to test this - are these structures different on PS4 see 4.?

6. does this happen only in 5.1 or in stereo also? you can check the dev kit debug settings to force channel output configuration regardless of the hardware you are using.

Lastly I suggest that either yourself or a collegue makes a concurrency capture in razor to ensure that ample space within the frame is available for wwise to run.

-

dan.m

Comments

Hi Dan,

Info I probably should have provided previously.  This is a UE4 project running on 2017.2.9.6726.  I'm 2 days from a day one patch submission upgrading the SDK libraries from 2017.2.9.6726 to 2019.1.2.7018 would be extremely risky.  I have source access if I could get relevant files to diff that would save time.

The title appears to use Vorbis which I find surprising, seems like ATRAC9 should be the default codec for PS4.  That being said I'm not thrilled about changing the codec this late in the game.

The affinity was set to your default of 3f, we tested moving it to 40  (Core 6) and the result was worse.

There are no structural differences between the platforms from my brief time looking through the WWise project files.  This title uses a single project to define the structure.

I really only have access to stereo capability right now and it happens in that format.

I took some caputures and indeed there is little to no headroom with quite a few frames showing AK:EventManger @ 100.00 and the vast majority above 80

I'm currently rebuilding the banks with a global -50 from -60 and dropping the Max Voice Instances to 256 from 500, to see if that reduces the popping as the cause seems to be way to many events processing at once.

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> Info I probably should have provided previously.  This is a UE4 project running on 2017.2.9.6726.  I'm 2 days from a day one patch submission upgrading the SDK libraries from 2017.2.9.6726 to 2019.1.2.7018 would be extremely risky.  I have source access if I could get relevant files to diff that would save time.

maybe try to email support

> The affinity was set to your default of 3f, we tested moving it to 40  (Core 6) and the result was worse.

My suggestion here was intended to be to mask *out* CPU 7 ( 0x2F ) to avoid running on CPU 7 - just to see if that helps.

> I took some caputures and indeed there is little to no headroom with quite a few frames showing AK:EventManger @ 100.00 and the vast majority above 80

Certainly seems like there's too much work to do then - what is your frame size? this is one of the settings that was ignored on PS4 in, I think, your version of the SDK.

> I'm currently rebuilding the banks with a global -50 from -60 and dropping the Max Voice Instances to 256 from 500, to see if that reduces the popping as the cause seems to be way to many events processing at once.

Ok yes, even 256 sounds generous  - let me know if this helps your issue.