Quote Originally Posted by Ath192 View Post
IIRC the reason your FPS tanks is because FFXIV is CPU bound and uses very few cores. So if you open your task manager you will see 1 core at 100% and the rest very low, that gives you the 17% CPU usage or whatever. So yes, FFXIV could be improved to use all CPU cores and I think that would go a long way.

When you play at 4K it does become very GPU intensive, but the slowdowns you are talking about are because of the large quantity of players running around and your CPU calculating the positions for all of them. This is why the benchmark is smooth, there are no player movements to calculate.

It happens at Aetherytes because that's where a lot of people congregate. Thats also why we get instanced zones at the beginning of each expansion. Less people, less CPU strain, less FPS drops.
Exactly this, you can't really fix the draw calls the game has when it's rendering so many player characters at once without multi-threading taking the brunt. Unfortunately this game (1.0) was designed around a time that it was common place to only use the main core and then a few for extra tasks. They didn't rewrite this in 2.0 (ARR), so we're stuck with a 10+ year handling of CPU logic from days of old. Not that modern gaming utilizes CPU cores very well anyways... I'm sure they've done some optimizations over the years but it's still not good enough for using anything above [Normal] setting in (Other): Character and Object Quantity.

The only real way to improve CPU-bound FPS by an ok amount here is to buy the 3D cache CPUs from AMD. Not everyone is willing to shell out that cash though, understandably.