Common/Frequent Lag often leading to crashes and Dx11 issue

[Stamaskas]

Good day everyone. After spending a solid week trying to fix this, and making multiple support tickets, I have been unable to resolve this issue. A recent crash right before the Fox Lady Fate ended has pushed me over the edge and I have decided to come here as my last resort to try and find a solution to this.

The Issue:
What I originally thought was just some weird lag the only happened in Anemos has proven to become the bane of my existence in this game, and has recently only gotten worse. Simply put, the game lags to a point of being unplayable and often crashes from a fatal error or something of the sort. From my attempts to fix this problem, I have a decent description and possible idea of what it is. For everyone who uses Fullscreen Borderless, I am sure you know what the game looks like when you alt tab and look at it. That is basically what my game appears to be doing. I did not realize this until I was watching my task manager usage. When I expected my GPU/CPU to spike during the lag, instead, it would drop down to the default values it holds when the game is not running, the same thing it does when I alt tab. The problem obviously is that I am not alt tabbing and the game is still running and responding to what I do, just in that alt tab lag way. I find that the game only does this during Fates, both in the normal world and in Eureka's NMs. Relogging has proven to make the lag go away, I be it, temporary, for about a max of 10 mins and sometimes not helping at all.

PS: I am also making this forum because one of my previous support tickets said to make a forum post for potential bug so that is also there.

Attempts at Solution:
I would say it is safe to assume I have tried most of the simple things but feel free to say whatever as, at this point, nothing cannot hurt. Things I have done include: fresh installation of graphics driver, ensuring Windows is up to date, reinstalling the game (currently in process of trying this a 3rd time), lowering graphics settings, trying windows 7 compatibility mode, ensuring no firewalls are up to interfere, taking off any added overclocking from separate programs, and ensuring no overlays are running on the game.

The only thing I have found to work, which lasted for 2 days before it had problems, was running Dx11. That seemed to fix the lag issue, but the problem is, and I have tried a while to fix this too, is that my Dx11 leads to the Fatal Error generally around every 30 mins to an hour. Dx9 does not have that crash issue, but does have the "alt tab" lag problem I described. Claiming Dx11 fixes it is coming from those 2 days of no problems, which the game started acting up right after I claimed it was fixed.

System:
My system's specs are:

Windows 10 64bit Home
NVIDIA GTX 1070 GPU
Intel i7 7700k CPU
ASUS Prime Z270-P Motherboard
16GB Corsair RAM

The game is installed on my E: drive, a 1tb Samsung 850 Evo purely for games. If wanted, I can post my graphics settings but I will restrain from that for now due to the length it would add to this post. I basically use just default settings with high graphics, only having changed keybinds and name tag colors.

Important Info:
One thing that could be assumed is that temperatures or usages could be causing this. I have always just said that is not a problem but I will put exactly what my system does when I run this game.

GPU: runs from 60-95% usage, higher end usually only occuring during load screens and runs at a general max of 75C, very rarely reaching up to 80C (fyi, my GPU was at a constant 100% in Far Cry 5, and ran without any problems at around 200fps, so I don't consider that high usage to do anything).

CPU: runs around 60% usage max and goes up to a general max of 60C, rarely reaching up to 64C. (this is decently hot for a CPU I know but being its general risk max is 80C from my knowledge, I do not think this should be a problem either).

Memory: Nothing I have seen to be note worthy, runs around 50% when I have the game running and other background stuff running.



TLDR:

Game appears to do a forced alt tab like situation when participating in Fates/NMs and only then. Dx11 seems to help with this issue but its constant crashes make it a bad solution. Done every common troubleshoot I can think of, and my system seems to run the game without a problem when it comes to usages and temperatures. I believe my two options to fix this is to either find what or why it is doing this alt tab like situation when I am still 100% in the game, or find a way to stop Dx11 from occurring these Fatal Errors.


I apologize for the long post but I like to give all the information I can ahead of time to allow for the best chance of getting this resolved. I appreciated all your time and anything you have to offer is greatly appreciated.

[KisaiTenshi]

The only thing I have found to work, which lasted for 2 days before it had problems, was running Dx11. That seemed to fix the lag issue, but the problem is, and I have tried a while to fix this too, is that my Dx11 leads to the Fatal Error generally around every 30 mins to an hour. Dx9 does not have that crash issue, but does have the "alt tab" lag problem I described. Claiming Dx11 fixes it is coming from those 2 days of no problems, which the game started acting up right after I claimed it was fixed.

Check if game PVR or PVR-like software is running.

There is really no reason for this to happen and you said that it changed when you switched to DX11, which suggests that the issue is something monopolizing the GPU power, or recording the GPU output (thus the latency.) The crash is then when it runs out of ram/disk space to continue.

Another thing you can try is going into the GPU driver settings and reset it.

Windows, OBS, Steam, nVidia Experience, MSI Afterburner, etc all invoke various kinds of GPU recording activities of which only one can really work at a time because they all want to do the same thing. Much like when Antivirus products stomp on each other when more than one is installed.

[Einmimiria]

Good morning and thank you for posting on the Final Fantasy XIV Technical Support Forums.

It looks like we are already discussing this in a different thread. I have responded to the original one. However, I'd suggest taking the advice from the poster above as well.

Thank you for visiting the Final Fantasy XIV Technical Support Forums.