Suddenly low FPS across all zones, after spending some time in-game

[AvalonBright]

I've never run into this issue other than in some zones with a lot of foliage and running water. Brayflox, for example, has never given me particularly good framerate. Anywhere else in the game though, it's not a problem. In Windowed Fullscreen I get about 50-60fps. Dungeons, raiding, out in the world, etc. Even in extremely crowded areas it'd drop to about 40 at worst.

But lately if I spend only about 30-60 minutes in game, my FPS just completely tanks. I'm lucky to push 20-25 fps in the world, and in something like Revenant's Toll I'll get anywhere from 15-18. I have changed no hardware, made no graphic setting changes, nothing. It's getting really frustrating because I can barely get anything done before it just plummets to unplayable levels.

I can also hear that my GPU fan almost stops when this happens too, but I'm not sure if that's a symptom of it already tanking and thus making the GPU not need to push itself, or if the GPU stops pushing itself and thus the game tanks. However, I will say I don't have an issue of the GPU just deciding to *stop* in any other game so I doubt it's the latter. If anyone can explain what the heck is going on, it'd be very appreciated!

[MythToken]

Hmmm, the GPU fan stopping is concerning. You might want to try swapping it out, if your fan is burning out, your cpu could be reducing performance to keep from overheating.
How are your heat levels? Obviously the fan is still working in some capacity so it's probably not the fan, but would be good to check just in case.

I had a similar issue with Ram Sticks going bad. It slowly got worse, until 2 of my sticks were getting a lot of hard faults. There is a way to check this in Windows.

Those are the first 2 things I would check. If both of those look good, I would move on to the graphics card, see if you can monitor its performance/heat levels/ect.
If the fan isn't working properly then it could be overheating as well.

As for software, are you running NVIDIA or AMD graphics card? If AMD, check your version on Catalyst Control Center, may need to do a complete uninstall reinstall. There have been some pretty big upgrades for CCC lately.

These are my best guesses as to the culprit, I don't believe it has to do with your internet connection, since it is affecting your fps, and you are loading well in crowded areas.
Good luck

[AvalonBright]

I've actually been having some major PC issues lately and had to do a reformat, which is when the issues started it seems. Of course in the course of that, I did numerous hardware tests. No bad RAM, no hard drive issues, and in contacting Radeon directly (because I heard so much conflicting info about temperatures) I found out that the card's maximum operating temp is a good 30 degrees higher than FF pushes it. So it shouldn't be throttling itself due to THAT, either. I'm totally at a loss. And yeah, I've kept CCC and general graphics drivers updated...

I feel like in having to reinstall FFXIV between reformats, I probably missed some configuration change I'd made on my old setup, since it started happening after I reinstalled. But, I've tried every mix of configurations I can think of and nothin'.