sounds like a memory leak.

when was the last time you did a registry scrub?

is your laptop also a radeon chipset? i've noticed the radeon tech doesn't run the game as efficiently.

NVID's SLI tech also seems to fail pretty hard when rendering. I can't set anything on high without my machine freaking out if i put it in SLI. on high settings i'll almost always crash within 20 minutes due to overload on the GPU.

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From what I can tell, when in full screen mode it prioritizes resources to to FFXIV, and because the game is so demanding it can force your system to hit it's cap and create a bottle neck. windowed mode seems to be capping resource pull. I had a similar issue in beta and just ran things in windowed mode all the time after i noticed the drastic difference in pull. you can't alt+tab in FS mode currently so it's not surprising the resource allocation changes. but the engine is so inefficient it screws everything else up.

I'm hoping this is fixed i 2.0 with the new engine. I've got a pretty decent rig and would love to put everything on max settings and really enjoy all the hard work SE put into the game to make it look fantastic.