GTA IV, GTX 680, i7-3930K, 32GB RAM

Remove 16gb of ram and see how that goes.

The second thing is gta iv is 4-5years ago, so I presume it runs better with fermi based cards rather than the latest technology of kepler. Another thing is, gta is a CPU intensive game, so it is a possibility that the CPU is bottlenecking, that's just my thought.

oh my ******* god!!! I said, don't give me the ***.... CPU bottle neck?? what do you do for a living mate? Is 6 core hyper threaded at 3.2 Ghz not enough for a 4-5 year old game?
Remove 16gb of ram??? WTF sort of answer is that?

I don't think his CPU would be bottlenecking considering it is one of intel's flagship processors. Check the version of your drive, also the ram like the person above said.

Checking the ram would be beneficial. Not so much removing it all, but faulty ram can cause similar issues.

never played it for the PC, but if i recall, the reason for that was because it was a horribly optimized console port. try looking around if there's any sort of unofficial mods or patches that optimizes it better.

something to start off with; a quick google-fu gave me this as the first result;

http://blog.tune-up.com/news/the-essential-grand-theft-...

EDIT: oh, hey, a RAM fix at the bottom of the guide for stuttering!

Do your SSD have the latest firmware available for it as i know they can cause freezes/stuttering issues...

Don't have GTA IV to test as i have the same card as you but for me anything run fine, do you have problems only in GTA or in other games too ???

Yer mate, still not helpful.

I don't wanna hear *** like, its my drive version (all other games are fine, all other programs are fine) , its your ram, its corrupt (everything else is fine). I run a tight ship here, I am a software developer by trade and know my ***. Either, this game is (highly) bugged with this hardware config (and someone ought to know about it) or there is something else BIG TIME OBVIOUS I am missing. ...

Acting like a douche isn't the best way to go about asking for help, just saying...

Yup, I know what you're saying, sometimes its easier to 'just be' and reply with positivity and all that.... but, I all I wanna do is play my game, and have at least somewhat intelligent answers and not just the obvious pointed out to me, given that I mentioned that in my original question, I got to point that out!

It's just that I read about 20 posts before posting this, and 90% percent of the answers were *** like "GTA IV is cpu intensive" and other rubbish, so yer, I see this as people just trying to get their number of posts up with crap, rather than actually adding value to the community.

... being a douche, whatever man, just add something constructive, all I asked for.

believe it or not it is a cpu bottleneck, as that game is terribly optimized. no matter what rig you have, you cant crank that game up all the way. make sure view distance is no more than 50%, and you should be fine. all the other settings you can turn up.

reinstall latest beta drivers from nvidia
turn off vsync if its on
if that doesnt help then maybe the game being too old doesnt like the new kepler architecture  

+1
Also make sure to disable Vsync when you play this game.

That game is horribly optimized lol!I am surprised nobody but hazle has mentioned that yet.There is no fix for you or anyone with that game.At least not that i am aware of sorry.

i mentioned it, that was exactly my point. the game runs the same on my i7 as it does on my c2d.

oh i missed that my bad.

no big deal.

OK well, I tried hazle's link, to no avail. Thanks for the input though, this was useful to try.

I guess I did not mention in the original post, that I have tried the obvious, ie. low graphics settings etc. and about 20-30 variations of it. In fact, when I tried it on the "lowest possible settings", it was worse than on the highest (this in terms of the lag every few seconds)!!!

Basically, I used to play this game on an old rig, and it ran 'fine'. But I just can't accept that just because the game is 4 years old, that it can't be run properly on modern hardware. This, is a major failure for rockstar and steam, given the fact that I "re"-bought the game to play on my new machine and it doesn't play at an acceptable frame rate!!!!

I mean, who would think that this game can't be played on the system I described above? Even after trying multiple workarounds and many many hours searching the net for answers!!!

what is the draw distance at?

That game is horribly optimized.I would give up.I mean seriously it cannot be played as you like so why bother

I'm getting the same results. People are saying how they can get 70+ FPS when playing.

I don't see it.

My usually lowers to 25 fps at times and just stays at around 35FPS.

The Benchmark says I get an average of 66 fps, but when I'm playing it never goes passed 60.

I have i5 3570k and GTX 670.

Exact same setup as above, averages around 30FPS and drops to 20FPS frequently.

OP is probably experiencing a CPU bottleneck, or driver issues...