Without knowing your PC specs it's hard to say. I know that Dawntrail brought a large upgrade in terms of minimum needs to the PC power to run.

Now when I have looked at the task manager, it only seems to spawn the 1 process (ffxiv_dx11.exe in my case), not dozens of daughter processes, but I haven't had a chance to see how many threads or handles it opens. I know on my machine, my CPU runs at 12% overall or less, less than 25% on the GPU and around 2-3 GB of RAM for FF14. Now I am running an i7-14700k, RTX 4070, and 64 GB of RAM (PC was rebuilt for playing DT) so I have a lot of overhead.

Best I can offer is go to the official page (the news outlets have different specs that don't line up) and look at the recommended PC requirements. If your just barely there you will prolly have issues, as those specs rarely take into account anything other than the OS and the game. So things like gfx drivers, mouse drivers, Steam, etc etc which all take overhead aren't included. It sounds a bit silly, but if you have a higher end setup, make sure it does stay cool enough, throttling would cause a lag spike/stutter as well.

SE says the minimum CPU is a i7 7th Gen, with a recommended i7 9th gen preferred. They say a minimum of 8 but 16 GB recommended RAM, I would personally say put 32 in if you can, but then, I tend to over engineer things. A minimum of a GTX 970 or Radeon RX480 graphics is needed, with a whopping RTX 2060 or Radeon RX5600XT as the recommended. They also have ended DX9 official support, as well as support for FAT32 disk types.

It was a large jump in requirements. Now given that we all run other things, I would say that your PC should be closer to the recommended specs as a starting point. Anything above that will let you add on the options and features with little impact. If you can't add much to the PC, then a simple thing that may help is simply lower or turn off the shadows quality, it does make a difference for some.

I wish you the best in going forward, and hopefully have given you a point or two to look at.