toejam316: What settings are you running? Because for everything maxed at 1080 you really need at least a 980/1060. I suspect you're just expecting a lot of your gpu. Also, keep in mind that the gtx 970 only has 3.5gb effective ram.
A mixture of Ultra, High, Med and low. I've got some idea on what impact the available settings have so am going with that. Sometimes I have seen vram near a maximum 4gb but other times only more 2.5-3gb. It's likely settings related but I can't say which ones.
It could be vram related but lowering settings doesn't seem to help and I've heard lowering graphical settings actually move's more graphical work to the CPU only making things worse. I did actually find moving some of the settings up resulted in better performance. The balance is likely designed that way.
If people aren't experiencing the same thing with a 4690k then I'm really confused.