FPS Drop during Camera Panning

I noticed on sunday that I've begun having a very peculiar drop in framerate while the camera is panning while in certain areas, usually those with a heavy graphical load (IE, Areas in cities that are heavily populated, or even looking in the direction of that area, regardless of if I can actually see it or not (Being at the Weaver's or Alchemist's Guilds in Ul'drah and looking towards the Guild Supplier.)

This issue does not seem to apply in areas that are not under heavy load, and under normal circumstances (and before this started occurring) I would get a consistent 60 FPS (70-ish with the cap disabled) in any area that wasn't under a heavy load, and even in areas with more significant load It would generally only drop to around 40. Now, panning the camera in the aforementioned sort of locations will cause the consistent 60 to drop to around 47, or 30 depending on the locale + time of day (peak hour load and whatnot.)

The drop immediately subsides upon ceasing movement of the camera, and strafing or movement without manipulating the camera causes no loss in performance.

I've looked around for a solution/reason for this, but everything I've managed to find dates back to last year, and has no real solution provided, as if the issue just ceased to exist at random. Is this simply a known issue and there is no fix, so nobody bothers asking about it, or was a solution found and I simply cannot locate it?

I'm running a GTX770, 16384MB Memory and a i7 950.

Occlusion culling has been factored in as a cause of this.

Yeah, I had read that in the older threads. Unfortunately, disabling it had no effect.

This has been an issue since launch. I can recall at least five separate threads about it. There is no fix outside of throwing money at more powerful components; and even then your FPS will still drop, just to levels that are acceptable. Around this time last year some idiot named Ranebow ignored all explanations provided and tried to do some unofficial whatever thread to gather users suffering from the problem (which is EVERYONE) and a moderator just dumped it into the Resolved Issues after everyone realized they'd just have to suck it up.

Ah, understood. That basically confirms what I was worried about. I had my suspicions this fell under "Issues that likely won't be fixed until the DX11 client hits," but I just wanted to confirm if I was just being a blind idiot and had missed something because the alternative was...

I've been playing for roughly a month now (counting the time in the free trial) and this issue only started occurring on sunday. Since it's unlikely (Impossible) that I only started noticing such a glaring issue a few days ago despite playing for so much longer suggests that it's a symptom of hardware degradation...most likely culprit, my processor.

So I figured I'd check here for a possible solution before I go out and blow money on a new processor, and by proxy a new motherboard. Unfortunately, that appears to be the only solution. Either way, thank you Syx for the explanation.

I wish I had more to offer. While I don't see any impact on my framerate when panning in an area with a low number of PCs, I have always seen an impact on my framerate when panning my camera in a populated area, such as most Aetherite locations. That said, my system is still capable of maintaining over 30 FPS even in dense crowds. One option (which is only available to Windows users, for some reason) that I've used is to turn the number of players displayed in my area down from Maximum to Minimum. The setting is in System Configuration > Other Settings > Character and Object Quantity.