New drivers are good.

[James D Jarvis]

So after some odd performance issues lately I decided to actually update my drivers. Lo and behold the system update imposed on me by windows had in fact messed up a bunch of things and my GPU was going virtually unused by the OS itself. The performance "boost" I'm seeing is noticeable and that alone is absurd, I shouldn't be able to notice this but I can. I was worrying that my system was physically damaged somehow. Turns out the system was indeed just mostly ignoring the GPU. 
So update those drivers. (or do a better job monitoring and controlling system updates than I did)