It sounds like you are suffering from the same issue I’m having. It seems that the sim falls into some kind of performance black hole when you switch into VR (and sometimes when you just go into the settings screen, and other times just when you load up into the menu).
I’ve had this issue on two completely different PCs, one of which I’ve just built. Sometimes you start the sim and everything runs well and smooth but more often than not it gets itself into this broken state with everything stuttering and even the headset tracking struggling.
Does any of this seem familar:
I’m reading a bunch of VR performance threads right now and it seems to me that something is going wrong during the sim loading up and initialising, or when switching into a different graphics mode. It’s happening to some folks all the time, for others some of the time, and for others not at all.
This is why we’re seeing poor performance on good hardware. That’s someone who isn’t getting the sim to load up properly at all. For me it’s about 1 in 4 on my 3070 system. On my old 1660ti system it was about 3 out of 4 times it would load properly and run well.
Even the flickering ASW props was for me related to this on my old system- the flickering prop was just another sign that the sim wasn’t running at full speed. Exit to desktop and reload the sim and the flickering prop would be gone. There are still ASW artifacts with props but actual flickering - NO - this is the sim not running right.
There is a deeper and intermittent performance issue going on with this sim and it isn’t happening every single time you load it. I’d be interested to hear more details about what you’ve tried and if you have ever seen good performance in VR.