FPS locked to 30 with video playing on 2nd monitor.

I'm having a bit of a weird issue here. It's by no means game breaking, but it is a touch annoying. Anytime I have Youtube, Netflix, or any other video playback application running in the background on my second monitor, FFXIV locks my FPS down to 30 from 60. I did manage to find a work around by uncapping the framerate entirely, but I like it locked to 60 for this game. It seems to give me the smoothest experience, even with GSync.

System specs:
2700X
1080 Ti
primary monitor: 3440 x 1440
Secondary: Samsung 4K TV

I've tried disabling fullscreen optimization in FFXIV's compatibility options and updated all drivers, but short of just not watching any video while playing, I'm at a loss for keeping it locked to 60. I'm still not sure if this is Windows' funky update stuff they like to do, NVidia's funky update stuff they like to do, or just some strange code still buried in the game files from way back. This game has a lot of those "veg out with youtube on" times, but 30 FPS is just a little too choppy for my tastes. Anyone have any experience troubleshooting this? Thanks!

Well, there's three potential reasons:

1) Playing video at the same time windowed, requires nothing, it will just work. FFXIV does have it's own frame limiter, and there is a feature to turn the frame limiter on when the game is not in focus.

2) Playing video full screen on one monitor and the game full screen on another monitor... kinda requires separate GPU's. It depends how well the game deals with the full screen switch. FFXIV on my machine for example, since it allows you to select which monitor to play on, both the iGPU or a HDMI monitor while the game is on the displayport @ 4Kp60 works. If your monitor switches to 1080i while full screen for some reason, then it will force all monitors on the same card to 30hz. This shouldn't happen, but there is a condition specific to HDMI, where if you use a 4K monitor on HDMI 1.4, it will force it to 24p, and likewise, some devices attempt to switch the monitor to 24hz if the source video is 24fps (eg film's that are encoded as such.)

3) If possible, connect all monitors and televisions by displayport. Windows locks all monitors to the same refresh rate, and on some cards that have a mixture of displayport and HDMI, using the HDMI port at all, will force all the HDMI ports to that refresh rate.

Like if you want to debug this, bring up the info panel on the TV/monitor when you see the frame rate drop and check if it changed the refresh rate on both. If it's changing the refresh rate, then the answer is the refresh rate is being locked across monitors. If it's not changing the refresh rate on both, then the answer is more likely the video acceleration is not being the dedicated h.264 ASIC on the nVidia card.

For what it's worth I have the same video card, different CPU, and have run the multi-monitor setup before (either on the iGPU or the nVidia card) and the h264 hardware acceleration that is flipped on depends on the order the codecs are provisioned by Windows. If you watch youtube or netflix in the web browser, open chrome://gpu/ you'll typically see "Video Decode: Hardware accelerated". You can try turning this off to see if it impacts anything, however I must express that anything you turn off in Chrome, will also turn it off in everything that uses nw.js (which can be considered a stripped down Chromium browser.)

First, this was very helpful. Thank you for the in-depth response. It was sorta number 3. My secondary monitor is a TV at 4K60 with 3:3:3 chroma rating, but it has no display port. My primary monitor is an actual ultrawide monitor with display port. The short version is that after my last driver update, Nvidia control panel reset my secondary monitor to 30 Hz. Setting the game to full screen worked to get it above 30 FPS, but the 120 Hz limiter wouldn't work. Luckily GSync took care of any tearing in cutscenes. After setting my secondary monitor's refresh rate properly, though, I can lock it in at a constant 60 in borderless windowed mode regardless of what's playing on the other monitor. Thanks again.

Hello Wanderica, Thank you for posting on the Final Fantasy XIV Technical Support Forums

It appears you have resolved your issue with the help of another player. I will be moving this thread to 'closed concerns' Please do not hesitate to create a new thread of you have any other issues.

Thank you for playing Final Fantasy XIV! Hope to see you online.