bottleneck performance?

[Itseotle]

When you had your friend test, did you make sure s/he was looking at the same area of MD as you, and not at the floor? As a couple others have pointed out, I'd just blame DirectX 9 being slow. It doesn't matter how fast your CPU or GPU are if the graphics API itself is a snail. I run an older i7 2600k with a GTX 970 OC, at max settings, and get anywhere from 20-30fps in the heart of Mor Dhona. S ranks ive dropped to ~15fps. Not unusual in crowded areas. I highly doubt you are bottlenecked anywhere.

That could be the case. So its just driver optimazation and such?

Also:

My graphic settings are "Maximum" except that I turn party effects to limited so I can see my character and not a laser light show in combat xD
Also I miss typed in my OP, I have a 970 not a 980 but its still not utilized as you can plainly see.

one thing though, i once used sweetfx, tweaked somethings here and there. then there was one time i format my drive, and i only backup my game data. now that im running the game under the new OS without sweetfx, any chance it might affect something?

Not likely to cause this issue. If anything, it would increase your load and lower your fps, but since your not capping then it shouldn't hurt it. I use SweetFX myself, and disabling it doesn't affect my FPS by more than a few points.