Thanks for sharing your findings! Can you check one thing? With the Oculus performance HUD shown, when the stuttering happens, do you see frames being dropped and a downward spike in the Performance Headroom. Can you hit 90 FPS constantly or do you see it varying? Do you see any difference with AWS turned on/off?
Maybe we should move this discussion back to the Oculus forum and raise our voices.
Is your Windows 10 Game bar disabled? I’ve seen several reports of it costing a lot of performance. Here’s how to turn it off: https://www.howtogeek.com/273180/how-to-disable-windows-10s-game-dvr-and-game-bar/
Did you try a clean install? If it’s not UE4 relatd, maybe something else. Disable all virus scanners, background services, etc.?
Optimizations can surely be done on development computers, but the point is that it should ultimately work well on regular user’s computers, to whom you cannot ask to uninstall standard applications/features just to make your own product work as expected.
We don’t aim for 90 FPS, as we do quite demanding visualizations and real-time configruators. At that level of complexity, we cannot reach 90 FPS on an HMD although our scenes are somewhat optimized (not as optimized as e.g. a 3D shooter, but coming from the games business, we do have an understanding of optimizing scenes). Plus, we sell the complete system… hardware, software all bundled in a nice case, ready to be used “out-of-the-box”.
We can pre-configure our systems completely. The standard configuration for our PCs (notebooks) is a GTX 1070 (8 GB video RAM), current i7 CPU, 32 GB of RAM, SSD etc. Eveything that should make the VR experience as fluid and smooth as possible. Yet, even with the comfort of being able to pre-configure the entire system, Oculus doesn’t allow us to e.g. permanently disable ASW (which smoothes the stuttering noticable, if turned off). With ASW on, the stuttering sometimes (maybe in 2 of 10 cases), the stuttering becomes so bad, the whole experience is simply not at all bearable.
Now, you might think that our visualizations are simply too demanding hardware-wise, but that’s not true, as they run at solid 45 FPS. Plus, with the new Oculus Home screen the stuttering and jitters are even noticable with just the Home screen open. And I’m 100% sure everything used to run a whole lot smoother, when we first decided to use Oculus Rift for our systems. Even if the current issues may probably not be Oculus’ fault alone (as there might be multiple sources such as NVidia or Windows), I fail to understand, how I cannot configure my hardware according to MY preferences (ASW off). That’s just insanely arrogant or at least ignorant of Oculus.
I will try and disable the “game bar”, although I believe that the expensive part of the game mode, game bar etc. ist the optional DVR recording. And that’s already turned off on our systems (as it’s off by default). But thanks for your reply. I’m always interested in new things to try out.
The systems are by definition “clean installs”, as these are PCs we’re going to sell with our content. They carry only Windows, Oculus and UE stuff. No other games, tools, system hacks… nothing.
I will do some more research today and then probably open a comprehensive thread on their forum. Also opening a support ticket with a reference to that and this thread (and the multiple other threads on the web where people moan about issues like this… The web is full of it. And also full of the usual recomendations… that I’ve all tried - no fix in sight). It’s kinda funny how Oculus invests money in developing a new colorful Home screen, when you can’t even enjoy it jitter-free. 
@Sharkster-NVR Just read that the author of the Oculus Tray Tool is working on a new version supporting the 1.22 API. That may help with the ASW control issue. This said, ideally the whole pipeline should work out of the box, without the need of any tweaking tools.
Just like I assumed before, the reason for the weird stuttering and jitters IS NOT UE4 RELATED. The sole culprit in my case are the NVidia drivers.
I gradually rolled back from the current (390.65) to the late July release (384.94). The short story: There’re no jitters and no stuttering in NVidia drivers up to late July. A slight stuttering started to sneak in with the driver released on August 14 (the day this thread was opened!) and seemingly became worse with every subsequent driver update (at least for my machine).
If your system is affected by this mess, roll back to 384.94 NVidia drivers and you’ll be surprised how buttery smooth Oculus Rift once was. Just make sure you do a clean uninstall of your current driver before (e.g. with DDU - “display driver uninstaller”), put up 384.94 and please report if that helped on your system too.
(Tested with OVR service - not tested with SteamVR)
Actually 385.xx had quite some VR related changes, so ti could be. And once you installed 384.94 installed everything went magically back to smooth? Also with/without ASW? What are the specs of your machine?
Yes, the moment you roll back to 384.94 all stuttering whatsoever disappears, no matter if with or without ASW. The specs of the system (a notebook) this was tested on: GTX 1070, i7-6820HK @ 2.7 GHz, 32 GB RAM. This is the standard configuration for the notebooks we hand out to our clients complete with our software/content installed.
The application we used for testing runs at 45 FPS (as expected), but if your system is affected, you’ll notice the slight stuttering already in the new Oculus Home screen. It’s a stuttering that feels like it’s coming from the tracking primarily. You experience a slight offset or very slight position switch every few seconds. You may argue that “slight” bumps and jitters are not a big deal, but in fact they make prolonged VR sessions unbearable.
Try it yourself to see the difference. You can find previous NVidia drivers here:
http://www.nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx?lang=en-us
I have been struggling with this also and I found that disabling the Geforce Share in game overlay got rid of my stuttering.
http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4228/~/disabling-the-geforce-experience-share-in-game-overlay
I’m on the latest nvidia drivers and havent tried a roll back yet.