Hi, this issue has been haunting me for almost a year now, if not longer. Since then I've tried everything under the sun to try and resolve this stutter issue, to no avail. Over time I started to suspect that VRChat itself might be the source of the stutters, here's my findings:

While walking, the player's position advances in uneven steps: in bursts, one frame moves twice as far as normal and the next frame does not move at all. Frames are rendered evenly the whole time, so frame-time graphs stay flat while the movement visibly judders.

A follow-camera test isolates it, and the attached video shows it. With the camera following the avatar and its smoothing off, the camera stutters exactly like the player's own view. With the camera's smoothing on, the camera is smooth (0.2% irregular steps, against about 25%) while the player's own view keeps stuttering at the same moment. A smoothing filter only hides jumps in what it follows, so the unevenness is in the avatar's position, before anything is rendered.

It has happened in nearly every session for over a year (if not more), in VR and in desktop mode, on two PCs with two separate VR headsets, and after a clean Windows reinstall. Other games on the same setup do not show it. Current build: 2026.4.1p1-1937-299983b13b-Release; the same behavior was measured on 2026.3.3p2-1921-15c4a824b2-Release.

The view jumps ahead a frame and then hangs for a frame, repeatedly, while the player walks. It looks like earlier and later frames alternating in quick succession.

(The file was too big to attach to this post)

The video is an OBS recording at 90 fps of the VR view with VRChat's camera set to follow the avatar (Look-at-Me). The camera's Smoothed option is off from the start until about 13 s, on from about 26 s to 37 s. Motion was measured frame by frame in the camera preview and in the player's own view.

Irregular steps in each part of the video:

Share of frames with clear motion whose step differs by more than 40% from the local trend (about 1,000 frames per row). With smoothing on, the preview showed no frozen or doubled frames, while the player's own view kept stuttering at the same moment (13% frozen, 12% doubled).

Visible in VRChat's own window (desktop mode and VR) and in OBS game-capture recordings. It also happens on a second PC (Ryzen 9800X3D, RTX 4070 SUPER), with a second Pico 4 headset, and after a clean reinstall of Windows 11 Pro. This rules out my drivers, my installation and the streaming software.

One hour in Resonite on the same PC, headset and streamer showed no stutter pattern whatsoever. In VRChat it usually appears within the first 10 minutes. This rules out the platform around the game.

Measured in Prismic's Avatar Search with the main monitor at 240 Hz (50 seconds walking left and right past avatars, moving in 94% of the frames):

It shows that frames are rendered on time and the unevenness is already in their content.

The headset always ran at 90 Hz. VRChat was relaunched with the main monitor at each rate and the same walk repeated, with the video recorded and measured. Double-step then frozen-frame pairs per second of motion:

One run of about 51 seconds per rate, and the stutter still showed at 180 Hz, slightly less often; placebo cannot be ruled out. It fits the related reports below, which tie movement timing to the refresh rate.

An inference from the measurements; VRChat's code was not inspected. The player's position seems to advance in fixed simulation steps and is shown without interpolation. When those steps nearly line up with the frame rate, tiny timing differences put two steps in one frame and none in the next, which is exactly the pattern measured. That would explain why it only shows while moving, why it comes and goes in bursts as the timing drifts into and out of alignment, and why changing the avatar or recentering resets it for a while.

A possible direction: interpolate the local player's position between steps, or advance locomotion in the render update using the frame time.

It does not happen on demand: expect smooth stretches of several minutes between bursts.

the player moves the same distance every frame while the stick is held.

bursts where one frame moves twice as far as normal and the next frame does not move at all.

My system is very high-end and powerful, and has been configured and tweaked to have no compromises, no bloatware, and is highly optimized for maximum FPS, minimum frametime and the best performance possible.

None of these removed the stutter:

If you need any more data or information, I'm more than happy to provide it when asked.