Calling All Computer Gurus! - Some Assistance

[Trancery]

Welcome to the club.

Windows 7 Ultimate x64
OS and FFXIV are on SATA III SSD's
i7 3930k stock running at 3.5Ghz during gameplay
GTX 680 running at 1072Mhz
32GB cas-9 RAM
1050W Corsair gold certified PSU
32MB down / 19MB up cable internet connection

I can run World of Warcraft in one window, a second account in another, Neverwinter in another, LotRO in another, torrents in the background, YouTube in one window, and Netflix running in another on my second monitor, all at the same time, with max settings on all games, and run all of it at once with no lag of any kind.

I can reboot and power cycle all hardware and start FFXIV with the bare essentials running, and I just lag around all day. I can't move out of red "bad" areas during combat, because they hit me as fast as I see them appear. No time whatsoever to move. No level 50 group content is possible.

The lag is completely identical at all times. It doesn't matter where I am or what I'm doing. It never gets better or worse.

If I'm walking around town on max settings, I get identical lag, no better or worse.
If I'm walking around town on custom settings with everything set as low as possible, I get identical lag, no better or worse.
If I go mining on max settings, I get identical lag, no better or worse.
If I go mining on custom settings with everything as low as possible, I get identical lag, no better or worse.
If I go run CM on max settings, I get identical lag, no better or worse, and get hit by everything.
If I go run CM on custom settings with everything set as low as possible, I get identical lag, no better or worse, and get hit by everything.

It's the same. All day. Every day. Doesn't matter if it's peak hours, or early in the morning. Doesn't matter if there are 100 other people running around on my screen, or no one at all. It's the same lag, all the time, never better, never worse. There's something wrong with this client.

I got an email today telling me it's time to shell out the subscription fees starting on the fifth. Hey SE; Guess what the chances of that are.

Kal that makes no sense...your computer is a BEAST! If I were to pay for everything I want it would be more than I could afford and it still wouldn't come close to your setup...

The last thing I want to do is buy computer parts and think it's going to be amazing and have FFXIV still suffer in FPS.

What kind of lag are you experiencing? examples? Is it framerate dips or having you perform an action and then it takes much longer for the action to actually happen? Are characters/npcs loading on your screen instantly or does it take a while for them to appear sometimes?

[Kaaltet]

Kal that makes no sense...your computer is a BEAST! If I were to pay for everything I want it would be more than I could afford and it still wouldn't come close to your setup...

The last thing I want to do is buy computer parts and think it's going to be amazing and have FFXIV still suffer in FPS.

What kind of lag are you experiencing? examples? Is it framerate dips or having you perform an action and then it takes much longer for the action to actually happen? Are characters/npcs loading on your screen instantly or does it take a while for them to appear sometimes?

Well, I'm actually having two different types of performance loss. The one above is just general fps lag. As I move around the world, every 1-2 seconds my character will just grind along in a massive fps spike for a half a second or so. I rarely freeze entirely for any amount of time. Just constant fps spikes. It reminds me of loading up World of Warcraft and enabling like 150MB of addons in a 25-man raid. Even though my rig can handle the game, I still lag spike around because the client chokes on the addons even though my CPU and GPU resource usage is very low.

I'm also one of the hopeless victims of the rubberbanding lag people from some ISPs are getting. SE claims my ISP is throttling me and it's not their fault. My ISP claims they're not throttling me and it's SE's fault. So I'm stuck unable to play while these morons are locked in this standoff. I've done a million traceroutes and so on, but whoever's fault it is, there isn't a thing I can do about it anyway. I have the same issue about every six months in Warcraft after a patch when they change something. Blizzard blames Cox (my ISP), Cox blames Blizzard, and I have three weeks of lag until they get over themselves and unlock their horns and resolve the problem. The rubberbanding began (what a coincidence) immediately following a patch about three weeks ago, but SE claims no responsibility.