Muezick
Okay. I'm definitely not going crazy. This newer GTX 970 definitely offers poorer performance compared to my older one. I've spent about 2 hours in each game, both Batman AK and Assasins Creed Unity using the newer GTX 970 (Elpida), this morning and rather than going around, trying to reproduce the Stutters, I just played the games normally.
 
The problem is extremely subtle, and intermittent, but I know I just saw batman AK drop like 500 megs worth of vram, the entire game froze up for a moment and it went from 3.7 gb of vram used to 3.2, and around that time my controls were locking up, and the framerate was stuttery. So perhaps the problem isn't a steady problem, but this sort of thing never once happened in my older GTX 970. I noticed the same thing happening in AC Unity, though it was to a lesser extent, and there weren't any situations where it dropped huge segments of vram entirely. (at least, I haven't seen it happen yet)
 
I must sound like some kind of crazy person, flip flopping my statements like this, but this problem has been driving me nuts. 
 
It's like...Sometimes the Elpida 970 just randomly decides to **** the bed. Sometimes it's alright, others, it's just ... not.
 
Bah. What a head ache.

blacksapphire08
Yeah a lot of people have said that the ones with Elpida memory have issues. For what it's worth i've heard that the ones with Samsung memory are better.