Terrible performance in Final Fantasy XIV with GTX 970

[Squa11_Leonhart]

if i disable shadows it skyrockets the FPS again to 60 or 50 something, just like FFXIV, and guess what, it's going to get fixed,

Probably by recompiling the behavior of these shadows. Or by nvidia working with bioware to make it so the shadows are in larger batches... or optimising culling for shadows that aren't actually in view.

Dynamic shadows are a dog to render at a high framerate without using them sparingly, or faking them.

Just like Skyrim, i'd get 30FPS looking at Whiterun from the top of the town before the NVIDIA optimization patch and then poof the whole game was a lot smoother and the "CPU" bottlenecks post stopped appearing, this on the old 570.

LOLWUT? there was no "NVIDIA optimization patch"! the patch (1.3 btw) was the proper usage of SSE (ie, actually turning it on >.>) instead of x87 fpu.

Others might remember TESV Acceleration Layer and Skyboost, these were code injected optimised replacements for the 'unoptimised' code using SSE/SSE2 that were made redundant with 1.3

Ironically i didn't upgrade my CPU and the performance went from average 40 to average 60, interesting CPU bottlenecks going on.

the x87 fpu is a hell of a lot slower on core 2 duo and amd phenom/athlon cpu's.
For basic arithmetic on nahalem and newer, this unit is on par with SSE, but as functions become more complex the performance tapers off

Skyrim 1.0-1.2 was using code that had not been inlined (improves pipeline execution and branch prediction) or sse optimised, which in a basic manner of explanation means the compiler rewrites standard C++ into instruction/machine code (rather then having to use assembly).

Yes, Bethesda also released a performance path that pretty much just made the game more stable by allowing the exe to use more than 4GB RAM which was done by the community long before they decided to patch it.

That was not a performance patch, it was a simple change of the compiler options to enable Large Address Aware, a setting that allows a 32bit application to use the 4GB user address spaces provided to 32bit applications under 64bit operating systems.

It does not allow more than 4GB to be used at all, and Virtual Address Space is often consumed well before the working set reaches that point.

The 4GB patch was only relevant to heavy texture modders anyway.

Just curious, would a 12 Thread CPU fix the problem?

NO.
The game only scales to 3 cores (load balanced of course).