update on October 12, 2016
So after thorough testing (+ after experiencing frame rate drops during cut scenes even with Crowd set to low, which made me think that Crowd setting is not the one) I found the achilles heel of nba 2k17 . See the update settings on the first post and you will see which setting jumps out with everything else maxed out.I am finally able to go through a full game @constant 60FPS with no frame rate drops/stutters whatsoever during certain cut-scenes and during half-time dunk showand I am running it on the latest nvidia drivers (373.06, windows 10 (x64), so deluxxe drivers are not an issue here.
Today I was looking "Forza Horizon 3 PC 1080p 60fps Performance Problems In-Depth Analysis" h
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofFpnArXbJ8 and as I was listening to the findings I already knew before testing it out on nba 2k17 that this will be the problem solver.
I don't have any precise info regarding the type of Anti-aliasing NBA 2k17 uses on its console version from which pc version ported, but I know for a fact that not all PS4 games have AA enabled and the type of AA differs from game to game (its all sort of variations (FXAA high, FXAA medium, TSAA, MSAAx4 and even custom AA types like for example for Assassins Creed 4 which uses in-house AA), so here the reasons for it (in game AA setting from 2-8) to be causing random frame rate drops on more than capable system can be many, but I am pretty certain that its one of the following:
1. no AA in console version and badly coded AA in pc port which causes in explainable frame rate drops;
2. some custom type of AA used in console version which was ported to PC although nvidia drivers do not recognize such custom AA;
One thing is for certain - at least on my monitor with 1440p resolution I cannot tell a difference between MSAA=0 and MSAA=8.