Client frequently stutters when using borderless window and gsync
My game works fine about 90% of the time, but I've had an issue for the past several months where the client will randomly start stuttering horribly after a few hours, as if it's dropped to 5 fps (even though it still reports 100+). Once the stuttering starts, the client will remain in this state indefinitely. If I go to a small area such as an inn room or the barracks it will become smooth again, but the problem returns as soon as I enter another large area. It won't fix itself again until I restart the game client (or sometimes my whole PC).
This seems to be getting more frequent, and has started happening on a daily basis. This might coincide with the release of 5.3
This only seems to happen when I'm in borderless window or windowed mode, but not fullscreen mode. I'd prefer to avoid playing in fullscreen mode since it doesn't work as well as borderless window for multi-monitor setups (black screen when display mode changes, quirky Windows GUI interactions, etc.).
Turning gsync off also seems to fix the issue, but I'd rather play with it on since it prevents screen-tearing and reduces display latency (no need for triple-buffering).
Strangely, if I click on a window on my second monitor (IE: this browser), the game instantly starts rendering smoothly again on the primary monitor. I can watch it running perfectly fine while I'm typing over here. As soon as I click on the primary monitor again to bring the game back into focus (AKA: make it the active window), it starts stuttering again.
This doesn't appear to be a hardware issue. You can see in these two screenshots that both my CPU and GPU aren't fully taxed by the game and actually have idle clock cycles left over:
Here are my system specs:- OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit (Build 18363)
- CPU: Intel i9-9900K (with dedicated liquid cooling loop)
- GPU: Gigabyte Aorus 2080 Ti Xtreme Waterforce 11G (452.06 Nvidia drivers)
- Memory: 32GB Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro DDR4 (18-19-19-39)
- Motherboard: Asus Tuf Z390M-Pro Gaming
- HDD: Samsung 970 EVO M.2 2280 2TB
- PSU: Seasonic Prime TX-1000 (1000w, 80+ Titanium)
- Monitors: 2x Viewsonic XG2760 (2560x1440, 165hz)
All of these parts are running at their stock clock speeds.
Here's a DxDiag dump:
https://pastebin.com/iZtuweKA
Here's an FFXIV config dump:
https://pastebin.com/zG8Eqmpq
Things I've tried which don't fix the issue:- Checking my hardware temperature monitors (everything looks fine)
- Setting all in-game graphics settings to minimum
- Rolling back my Nvidia drivers
- Disabling all in-game overlays (Geforce Experience, Steam, Discord, and Windows features)
- Seeing if this issue reproduces in other games (it doesn't)
- Seeing if anybody else has already reported the problem (there are several stuttering and g-sync issues related to FFXIV, but I couldn't find any reports that match the behaviors which I've observed)