The annoying hitching is because of the "seamless" zoning where the town (especially Uldah) is split up into tons of other zones. When you trip a zone line especially near the Uldah Market Ward/Aetheryte, the game has to seek the HDD for all the textures for the armor and weapons everyone is wearing. The engine seeks the HDD a lot because of the convoluted millions of .DAT files file system that they brought over from FFXI.
I had the same fps hooking issue, and my PC has lower specs than yours. Bought a SSD (Takes up 12gb on my SSD) and the hitching is greatly diminished. There is an option in the settings that allows you to cap the game at 30fps if you want to do further testing. (Also helps heat)
The issue here is whether you want to invest in one keeping in mind that an engine overhaul is around the corner.
