Game causes FPS stuttering which affects the whole PC.

[Raist]

These things are really hard to track down. For starters, I'd back off on all your overclocks a little. I found my RAM timings were just a little too aggressive. Apparently it was causing some micro stuttering from errors or something. I was seeing the same micro-stutter when I ran Furmark in a window, which made it easier to find the sweet spot.

Alos, might want to look at what is running in the background. Take a good look through your running processes in task manager and resource monitor (resmon). You may notice something odd like your security software is spiking CPU and/or network usage periodically while in the game (or something else for that matter). If it winds up being security, you may be able to remedy that by simply adding exceptions for the FFXIV executables and their folders so they don't get scanned. Other items, you may be able to disable them or something when you play the game.

It cold even be something as bizarre as the graphics card control panel. There's an old looping problem that likes to creep back in the nvidia control panel from time to time that can sometimes cause GPU resets, and the ATI CCC can sometimes be a resource hog and there have been instances where afterburner causes micro stuttering as well--even when used in a different front-end like ATI Tray Tools. Sometimes it can be remedied by simply not loading the system tray tool, other times you may need to disable the overclocking tool and try a different approach.

Oh yeah.. may want to look into your vertical refresh setting in the nvidia control panel also. Sometimes the adaptive modes can get a little weird. While you are in there, may want to set all our options to either performance or application settings as well. If it smooths it out, then you can go back in and start raising quality on some of them until you get a nice balance between stability and quality.