Graphite8five
I picked up FFXV a couple of weeks ago. I'm playing at 3440x1440 with G-Sync on, 1080 Ti FTW3 and with graphic settings at high-ultra with none of the Nvidia gameworks features on. In some areas of the game world I can get a relatively easy 80-90 fps and in more vegetative areas as low as 70 fps. The biggest problem is in battles with large amounts of enemy's or monsters. Most of the battle will sit at around 70 fps but frequently there are large framedrops as low as 40-50 fps and these are felt quite badly. It seems to correlate with certain weapon effects or lot's of stuff of screen. Is the 1080 Ti struggling with this graphics work at this resolution or could it be bad optimization of the games effects, battle mechanics etc? I've haven't experienced such jarring framedrops in most of my games at this resolution with the 1080 Ti up until this game and am slightly disappointed this could spoil FFXV.
 
This video I took is an example. At 0.26 where I strike a hammer the frames drop sharply from 70-40-44 fps. 
https://youtu.be/aaXap4Hp7Z8
 
 

HeavyHemi
 
 
Considering just a cursory Google Fu shows a massive amounts of complaints with frame rate drops during battle, I'd say it's both a game and issue. Look at it this way, Fallout 4? I can't max it out at 4K and stay over 50 FPS in large areas of the game, without AA and reducing shadows. Doom 2016? I can max every single setting at 4K and never drop under 80 FPS   That you're saying 'when there's lots of effects on the screen' is when I seen FPS drops..well, not too seem snarky, but isn't that exactly what always happens?    Also, what is your CPU utilization? Are you overclocking? CPU Temps?

EVGATech_ErinW
Are you running anything like PrecisionX OC to monitor the card? Try disabling power monitoring, and re-check your framerates. I tested this in WoW, and my frame rates smoothed out considerably. 

EVGATech_ErinW
 
 
In the hardware monitoring screen, click on the GPU1, then in the drop-down, un-check "Normalized Power". 

EVGATech_ErinW
Anything running in the background? Virus scan, Windows defender? Is shadowplay/streaming disabled in the Geforce Experience? Is the Xbox DVR/Game Bar disabled? 
 
Is it still only happening in battles, or out in the open with minimal action? 

Sajin

Graphite8five
On some occasions that sudden drop in GPU utilization is occurring while running around in the open (no battles). On the other hand I experienced another drop during a big big battle at an enemy base last night, tons of graphical effects on screen and a lot of action. I might try to see if the voltage drops also when this occurs.. Could this be a power delivery issue? Overclock related? 

Could be a faulty hdd/ssd. Try running the game off another storage device.

squall-leonhart
any file corrupted would be replaced due to failing checksum verification.

Graphite8five
Righty, any ideas on the utilization drop then? I will the put voltage in the OSD to check whether that suddenly falls off also.

Graphite8five
Is 35Mhz off the clock enough to drop a few frames? I also can't seem to maintain much over a 100% power target, I get 111% max but average around 100%. Is that a thermal limitation?

jeffmd
This is an issue with the game optimization. It sucks at balancing out a polygon workload and locking down a frame rate. It relied to much on adaptive resolution on consoles and sadly did not support it on PC.

Graphite8five
Well first FFXV crash. It was the same situation in which the fps came to a grinding halt except this time it actually crashed.. It occurred seconds after Iris performed one of her special techniques in battle, a kind of spin in the air and then a crushing blow. It was the FFXV.exe that crashed.. Could this still be related to an unstable GPU or other system component or just one of the bugs in this game?