High end system, still lowish FPS

[Loth]

So, my system specs are;

*Intel I7 980X 6 core @ 3.33 ghz (i prefer not to overclock,longer lifetime and less heat)
idles @ 4 cores 23-28 2 cores 35-40 degrees celsius (pretty sure it's a design flaw causing the 2 cores to run hotter)

*24 gigs of DDr3 RAM @ 1066 (max the 980 will support without OC,since I don't OC faster ram would have been a waste--I am also a programming student, I chew RAM like pringles)

*NVIDIA 590 GTX (also not OC, I could, but meh)
Driver v275.27(Beta)

With my options at
res- 1920 x 1080
No AA
General Drawing Quality: 10(Highest)
Background drawing quality: 5(Highest)
Shadow Detail: High
AO: off
DoF: off
Enable Hardware Cursor: on
Texture Quality: High
Texture Filtering: Highest


My system should (in theory) run FFXIV with everything on, max, and maintain 60FPS, however with even the options as they are, I'm getting 55-60 FPS outside (yay outside) but am stuck at 35-45 in town (more players/npcs = lower end).

Agreed, you should run it maxed out with that rig, the FPS you get are equal to mine, and I run an i7 920 with a GTX 570.

My settings are as following:
Res 1920 x 1080
AA 8xQ MSAA
General Drawing Quality: 8 (Standard)
Background drawing quality: 5 (Highest)
Shadow Detail: Highest
AO: off
DoF: on
Enable Hardware Cursor: on
Texture Quality: High
Texture Filtering: Highest

Am I missing something here? I should blow this out of the water with my rig. Hell, I can play the witcher 2 with ubersampling ON and pull 35 fps.

You actually are running with supersampling, the game builds the frames in a buffer, and the size of this buffer is set by General Draw Quality.
A GDQ of 8 is equal to your resolution, a GDQ of 9 is x1.5 of your resolution, and GDQ of 10 is x2 your resolution.

For some people 35+ is fine and "smooth" for them, for me anything less than 50 is unplayable (that's why I have such a high end rig, it messes with my eyes as I can notice the slowdown). I also have a lot of stuttering in town, any time a new NPC or character renders, FPS drops to 5-15 for a second or so. (monitored w/ FRAPS)

As Kassad linked you, this is due to HDD loading.
I used to run on a raid 0 setup with 2 Raptor HDDs, and I too suffered from some slight stuttering when first entering town or any area with a lot of people.
Resently I changed those for an SSD and have no longer any stuttering.

I can verify that both GPU cores ARE working, @ 96-99%. It also doesn't matter whether I play in windowed or FS(I prefer FS, but for some unknown reason they still haven't fixed the alt tab crash)

My question is, is there some mystery setting I should have flicked on or off somewhere that's causing this slowdown? Do I have to edit a .ini somewhere?Is it just extremely poor coding? I'm completely baffled. I thought my CPU might be bottlenecking, but when I turned off AA, I gained 10-15 FPS. 6 cores @ 3.3 should (again, in theory) be enough to handle this game as well.

Any suggestions?Thoughts?Comments?

Thanks much.

The game is not well optimized, and neither is NVIDIAs drivers for SLI (for FFXIV) (I ran sli until recently changing to the GTX 570) and doing an update of the SLI profile using this method made a big difference.
I think changing the SLI profile is what will make you run the game satisfactory.