Popin doesn’t mean stutter. Popin just means when assets shift LODs or appear based on distance/screenspace size. You can run at a perfect 200fps and the assets might still lazily popin or shift LODs, that part is by design.
If new assets are loading and and causing stutters, that type of popin just means shader stutter usually, or some kind of IO issue handling the request from the game to load the assets from the drive and that is part of what I meant with the DWM/MPO/security stuff.
You were, which is why I said do an advanced search before date on the forums here to see countless threads with the same complaints throughout the years. You just weren’t looking for the issues before this thread and you hadn’t spent a lot of RECENT time around tons of players in the same area dense, due to this expansion being new. The CPU usage did go up with 10.0, but so did the recommended hardware requirements. It’s not like it doubled or anything either, but it did go up by a bit.
Great, now remove that cap and test what I said, then do the same for WoW. You can also do both tests capped to 60. Make sure both are in modern zones. FF14s most complex zones would be somewhere around WoD level complexity, so compare it to a zone there. Then compare frame rates in something like Lisma vs Org AH when there are a lot of players around. Try to count them to compare equal numbers of players/pets/npcs around. You’ll see the relative performance drops in each game and FF14 still gets hit as hard, if not harder.
I’d correct that by saying that a lot of people don’t notice them if they aren’t looking for them. The catch-22 is that when people go to the forums and see a big thread about stutters, then they magically start looking out for them and might start to notice them, even if they hadn’t noticed them beforehand. They start running frame time graphs because they see people talking about them.
But yeah, getting frametime graph proof is the way to go. The problem is that most people don’t tend to have any prior information to compare it to, from before they started noticing the problem. So they will swear their game ran perfect before, even though it probably didn’t.
Though I guess it’s pointless to bring up the Mandela Effect because people will just argue it till they are blue in the face. Kind of like all the classic cultists that would swear up and down about something being some way, then Blizzard would throw out a ton of proof that they were wrong, but they would then swear that Blizzard was lying and that they remember it perfectly…