Is this normal performance for a GTX 970?

I have always ran BeamNG on weak hardware, and understandably the framerate wasn't great. However, I have built a computer which I feel should be enough to run the game at 60FPS at normal settings; this is something I can do with every other game, from Crysis to GTA IV ENB to GTA V to Shadow of Mordor to DiRT to Skyrim ENB and more. My specs are in the sig, but to put it more specifically:

Intel Core i5 4690 @ 3.5GHz
MSI GTX 970 @ 1400MHz
EVGA 500B 500 watt 80+ Bronze PSU
Crucial MX100 256GB
Gigabyte H97 motherboard

My problem is that I can't sustain 60FPS on ANY setting above lowest on nearly every official map. Port and Derby are the best, I can stay above the 40s but I drop to low 50s frequently. ECUSA and DRI are the worst. Any settings, and some areas I'm dropping to low 30s, even 20s occasionally.

I don't need the game to be maxed out, no PostFX, no dynamic reflections, but at least above Lowest would be nice.

My settings are:

All sliders at Normal or 3/4
SSAO on
HDR on

Lightrays off
DOF off
Dynamic Reflections off

AA off (it's on in the screenshot, but it isn't usually)
AF to 8x or 16x

Before I get a billion answers for these things, let me list the things I have done to remedy the issue

- Overclocked
- High Performance Mode
- All power savings functions turned off
- Card is set to Prefer High Performance in Nvidia Control Panel
- Properly installed drivers (safemode, DDU, etc)
- CPU and GPU are not throttling, CPU is usually at 45C and GPU is at 50C
- Lowered all settings, little change
- Updated graphics drivers
- Updated BIOS drivers
- Updated BeamNG
- No hogging processes running in background
- MSI afterburner says I'm running at full speed (1400MHz)
- CPU bottleneck isn't the issue - these framerates vary as I look around the map, and are unaffected by different vehicles

Is this a normal framerate for a GTX 970?





EDIT:

Here is the game running at Low, No AA, No AF, No PostFX.
Still drops below 60

 

the gtx 970 is one of the nvidia cards known to have problems with directx 9 games

T3D (the beamng graphics engine) uses directx 9 (for now, the beam devs are working with the torque devs to get dx11/12/opengl/vulkan/whatever else support working in T3D)

this is probably why your having problems, but don't take my word on that, it could just be something simple, but i do think it may be the whole directx 9 problem stuff

 

This makes a lot of sense, considering GTA IV runs worst than my 750 ti.

Are the devs really porting BeamNG to DX11/Vulkan? That would be great if they did

 

they are indeed looking into it (as well as dx12)

so not only should graphics wise performance increase a bit, but beamng can get a native linux and mac version as well, instead of people having to use wine or crossover or whatever