^^

Well, first off, I did a clean install of Win 8 to rule out any other program conflicts causing this. Namely any rogue driver files floating around. (i've had both AMD and Nvidia drivers on this rig as well as remote access apps that install their own display drivers)

With Win 8 fully patched up (but not updated to 8.1) and nothing else aside from Nvidia's latest drivers and FFXIV I still got the "goes black with sound, then comes back about 5 seconds later" issue 4 times in 2 play sessions.

In event viewer it's tagged as Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered. which certainly fits the profile of what I and some others are seeing. At least those of us who aren't straight up crashing or hard locking.

I've also tried (before the fresh install) running the game in windowed mode and borderless windowed mode instead of fullscreen. No change.

As well I tried a registry fix that extends the time before windows tries to recover the video driver (in case of a false positive from the card switching power states) but this resulted in DX errors straight to desktop instead.

Going to follow the nvlddmkm line a bit and see if I find anything.