Terrible performance in Final Fantasy XIV with GTX 970

[Raist]

You've still got some "eye candy" on that may be bogging you down a bit. For starters, try disabling/lowering the shadow options. That is one aspect I found posing a challenge on four different cards.

After that, you could look at some other options that may pick up a frame or so here and there like glare, HDR rendering, and screen edge darkening. Anisotropic and Radial blur shouldn't be having much impact either, but you never know. Have to remember you are dealing with DX9 calls that are all being emulated, on top of a pretty lackluster game engine as well. All that extra fluff is posing a challenge because of their implementation at the source, that gets further compounded by them using outdated API calls in Windows. Wish they could hurry up with the DX11 upgrades....

An afterthought... might want to disable the inactive frame rate limit too, just in case. Who knows--there could be some stupid side effect in the overlay. It's been known to happen in the past (more so with windows modes, but hey... this is an SE product after all).

grr... another thought hit me as I was logging into the game again. Make sure where you have options that crossover into your graphics card's control panel, that they are set to "Application Controlled". Sometimes you wind up causing issues when you set them otherwise.