Quote Originally Posted by Mirage View Post
That's a lot of text to solve a problem that is relatively easy to solve.

Turn on display scaling in your video card's settings. For nVidia cards, this is here.

For AMD/ATI cards, I don't even remember because I haven't used those in years. It would be amazingly terrible if they didn't have a feature that did the same as nVidia can do. Just look around in the driver settings and you'll probably find it sooner or later.

Also, have you tried decreasing general and background drawing quality in the game's settings?
Lowering the drawing quality will result in the game rendering the 3D stuff at a lower resolution than the game's actual resolution. Because the 3D is what's hard on your laptop's GPU, this will increase performance by a lot. At the same time, your user interface will be drawn at a high resolution, keeping the chat log, menus and menu text, and other UI element at high resolution so that you can easily read them.

Example.
General/background drawing quality set to 1. Resolution still 1920x1080, but much easier on the GPU. You don't have to turn it all the way down to 1. Any reduction down from "standard" will increase performance.

In case you're curious, no, I do not run the game at these settings myself. I just turned it down to demonstrate the effect to you.

And damn, after all these edits, my post became almost as tl;dr as Chrysomallos' . I still believe I'm a bit more to the point, though .
Btw I don't have those options in my Nvidia control panel. I see only a few of the tabs to the left but not even half of what's in that picture. This laptop has hybrid graphics so I believe there's an Intel 4000 in there along with this 640M so maybe some of the settings are on the Intel side but when playing XIV I think the Nvidia is what's trying to run the show.