GTX 970 graphics card
GIGABYTE GA-Z170MX-Gaming 5 motherboard
What finally fixed it for me was swapping my graphics card into another slot on my motherboard, and now it’s running very smoothly, even better than before. I moved it from the uppermost slot to the bottom slot.
Other things that I did was…
I’m using the Nvidia STANDARD driver. The one that came out March 19 (I believe), not the March 23rd one. Whichever is the one right before the newest driver. Also, when downloading the driver from NVIDIA website, it doesn’t download the standard driver by default. I had to google “ download NVIDIA standard driver”. It’s in the websites ADVANCED driver settings.
Using DX12 still.
But yeah if you’ve tried literally everything as I have, I will say try putting your graphics card into another slot, preferably the one furthest from the one it was in. I’m not super tech savvy but it worked for me. I didn’t have to change anything in the BIOS, just powered down, swapped slots, powered up and good to go!