After a month of playing with Windows, Nvidia, and Steam settings trying to understand why an rtx3080 couldn’t get something reasonable for MSFS, I learned a critical step that resolved all of the major stuttering I was having.
With respect to Steam users, one thing I learned while troubleshooting was that my performance is outstanding if I launch MSFS 2020 first before launching SteamVR. Once it loads up, I then run SteamVR and flip into VR mode. If I do that, I get 40 fps with my 3080 and everything is great. If I launch SteamVR prior, regardless of whether I then launch MSFS2020 in my Steam home or on the desktop, I get god awful stuttering even of the splash screens. I have no clue why but I’d love to know if someone has the answer. I suspect its not just an FPS GPU-strain issue but rather some other cause of stuttering because if I drop all of my settings in that context, it acts exactly the same (which makes sense given that the splash screens will stutter in VR). Again, if I fire up SteamVR for my Valve index AFTER launching MSFS, everything works great. It took me a lot of troubleshooting to learn that this basic order of operations was significantly impacting performance.
I had posted this in another thread but I am throwing it out as a new topic because I wish I had stumbled across this information a month ago. Almost gave up. I’d love to know if anyone has any insight into what Steam is doing differently or what is getting initialized that isn’t when the order flips.