Game has lower frame rate while focused compared to unfocused

ANY zone, no matter where. no matter the time, no matter if empty or busy. i've tested uncapping frame rate for the zones that are above my max frame rate. an example is the nexus arcade in solution 9, i am getting 93fps when in the game, but when i select a window on another monitor or alt tab to ANYTHING different, the frame rate goes up to 114fps ish (its around 111-116 depending on what people are doing). running borderless windowed on steam version of game. this appears to have started with latest update we just got. when in game if this lower frame rate is below 60ish as well it causes massive stutter due to variable refresh rate on monitor, even in areas where it dips to 60 and then i alt tab, it INSTANTLY jumps up to 80-90fps and any stuttering from others moving is gone. something is wrong when my game is focused.

specs: Ryzen 9 7900X3D, RX 7900XTX, 64GB of RAM.

only windows open: ff14, steam, firefox, windows explorer. no moving content on any of the screens. i've tried disabling all settings i can, even at lowest settings it will still drop by some percentage. when in game my gpu sits at 60% utilization, cpu is at 18%. when i click out of the game the gpu sits at 78% utilization and cpu is at 23%. so clearly it is not that something is using my resources. i've already tried disabling fullscreen optimizations and running as admin, i even reinstalled the game and reset all my settings. NOTHING IS WORKING.

update: i've even tried just regular full screen mode, i get the same frame rate as i do in borderless windowed, so that is not a problem either. is there anything that stops rendering or something when game is not focused?