(sorry if this isn't in the right sub)
I'm not really sure what to do at this point.

Specs:

• FX-8350 (stock, 4.0GHz)
• R9 280x
• 8gb RAM (DDR3-1600)
• 2x Corsair Force GT 120gb in RAID 0.
• Win 7 64-bit

For testing purposes, I put every graphical setting to the lowest setting (including pop. density and variety). I get 60 fps, with my GPU never going above 40% load, but then every 30 seconds or so my FPS drops down into the teens.

http://i.imgur.com/Xtbo4Zs.png

on that image you can see the FPS dips pretty clearly. At the point that I have highlighted, the numbers are:

As I'm looking at this, I'm wondering if maybe it has to do with the amount of RAM it's using? There's still about 1 GB of Free RAM, but maybe that's not enough? Pagefile is using 12GB out of 16GB.

The framerate drops seem to happen when the game is loading a new area. It happens a lot when I'm driving fast. It also happens when on foot, and I do a 180 degree turn, and the game starts to load in what was behind me. I'm starting to think that the bottleneck is occurring as the game is trying to either load textures from the HD into memory, or as it's trying to read the textures from memory.

I spent about 3 hours messing around with settings yesterday. Trying to set CPU affinity, OC'ing, pagefile settings, turning v-sync on and off, moved the game off my SSD C: and onto a mechanical secondary drive, benchmark after benchmark, and saw no noticeable improvements.

At this point the game is pretty much unplayable for me, so if anyone has any other suggestions that I could try, I'd really appreciate it.