For the sake of comparison with everyone else, and just so nobody thinks their hardware is to blame, I just ran the benchmark on maximum settings and scored 10,653 (High). With the graphics settings I normally use in game, I scored 15,538 (Extremely High). By all accounts, my hardware is more than capable of running the game. It's genuinely frustrating, because it used to only be in cutscenes (which severely hindered my experience of the story but oh well), but now it significantly impacts raids and the associated FPS drop from the audio process spiking in CPU usage results in some very unwelcome issues in raids.

I really hope someone takes this seriously enough to give us a genuine fix or solution. I played XIV only hours before early access maintenance and it worked perfectly, even in a very very very crowded hunt train. If we don't hear about this over the coming couple of days (since I'm away from home), I'll do a full reinstall of FFXIV and report back with any changes that might result in.