Additional Data Needed Regarding GPU Utilization Issues

[NagaRhul]

Date & Time: 6/12/18
Frequency: Consistently
World Name: Exodus
Character Name: Lyn Buvelle
Party or Solo: Both, really.
In-Game Time: Anytime
Area and Coordinates: Anywhere
Steps:
1. Open my task manager and monitor FFXIV.
2. Open the game, log in.
3. When the game window is inactive, my game is set to lower the FPS as intended. However, when the window goes back to being active, GPU utilization shoots to over 95%.

GPU performance change before and after you started having the issue:

GPU: Radeon HD 7970
Driver Version: Adrenalin Edition 18.5.1
CPU: AMD FX-8350
RAM: 8GB DDR3
Hard Drive: Samsung 512GB SSD
OS: Windows 10
OS Version: 1803 (Build 17134.48)
Graphics Settings: DX11, Light Ambient Occlusion, FXAA, 16xAF, Movement physics of all other players on simple, mine on Full, real time reflections off, all other settings high or max. 1920x1080 resolution.
FPS Limit: 60 FPS

My performance seems to have dramatically dropped over the last couple of months of patches. Back when Sigmascape wasn't even a thing yet, I used to play at a stable 60FPS all the time on a run like Deltascape V1 for example. Now my FPS fluctuates around the 53-60 area in game. It's very much playable yes, but there's no real reason as to why it suddenly can't stay at a locked 60FPS experience. My performance in the Ridorana Lighthouse bounces all over the place too. It does actually stay in the 60FPS area most of the time but you can definitely notice when it falls out of that area.

Other things: I have noticed that I absolutely cannot do anything else on my computer while FFXIV's window is active. I used to be able to at least put a window on my second screen and have a YouTube video play just fine while I'm playing the game and watching a video, but now when XIV is active the video stutters and becomes essentially unwatchable. My CPU usage sits anywhere around 30-45% so it's not an overloading issue or anything, but my GPU resources are being exclusively taken up by FFXIV all the time, sitting at around 95 to 100%.

I also simply cant stream the game through OBS anymore. OBS frame rate drops below 20FPS and streaming has become a messy and jittery experience. Again, not a bottleneck because I was able to do all of this fine way back in patch 4.1.

I also have a "13 MacBook Pro 2013 with Intel Iris 5100 graphics, and a 2.3GHz (2.9ghz turbo) Intel i5 CPU that I play on DX9 and low settings. All on Windows 10, of course. It used to play just fine at 30FPS consistently all the time at 1280x800 resolution back in patch 4.1. I capped it at 30 and it just never dropped or stuttered. Even I was surprised it ran comfortably. (I remember this because I was away from my desktop from the time for about two months and returned to it on the day of patch 4.2's release) Now, it rarely touches 30FPS anymore under any situation, hovering around the 19-26 FPS region, and it produces the same 100% GPU utilization issue as well. DX11 doesn't improve performance either, it actually further worsens the problem.

This issue is alive and well and I hope one day it gets resolved, I'll be glad to answer any additional questions if necessary!