hardware, settings, fps etc.

[Loth]

8 General Drawing Quality (setting this higher would make the games resolution higher and casling it down back to your screen resolution ending up with an anti aliasing like effect?)

GDQ of 9 renders the frames in a buffer 1.5x your resolution and a GDQ of 10 uses a buffer 2x your resolution.

Ambient Occlusion off (im not sure what it does? makes things shiny? well it seems to drop the fps by atleast 10-20 %)

Adds extra shadows to areas where direct light should not be due to geometry.

All graphical ingame settings (physics, shadows etc.) are set on on and the fps is set to 30. setting it to 60 i get strange stuttering every 3 seconds when i move my character around. the game runs then somewhere between 30-60 fps.

Als ran the FFXIV benchmark but and got barely 4000 points on 1280x720. the benchmark ran most of the time between between 60-80 fps but often droped for like 1 second to somewhere between 1-10 fps. thats very strange and shouldnt happen in my opinion.
I know its not a very good bench but still its strange with such a behaviour.

my system:
Windows 7 64bit
AMD Phenom II X4 955
8 GB DDR 3
2 x Crucial M4 (SSD) 64 GB in RAID 0
Sapphire Radeon HD 7850
1440 x 900 (32 bit) (60Hz)

So i wanted to actually now on what settings you run ffxiv, what kind of hardware and how smoth (fps?) it runs on your system. Any suggestions are welcome too.

I can not help you with the slow downs, I saw a video of the benchmark run on a 7970 and that had slowdowns too, could be driver related to their new cards, it seemed to coincide with texture loading.

As to your score, the "benchmark" is heavly CPU bound, so that is a big part of why your score is as it is.