It took a little while, but Nvidia believes it has pinpointed what is causing "most of the user-reported stutter" when playing SteamVR games, and has addressed the cause with a new hotfix GPU driver (version 461.33). This is one of several fixes included in the incremental driver update.

Complaints of stuttering in SteamVR date back at least to last October, after the rollout of Nvidia's 456.71 driver, according to UploadVR. This is due to frame spikes, which is especially annoying because frame drops in VR can cause nausea in some people. A few days ago, Nvidia's Manuel Guzman announced on Nvidia's community forums that a hotfix would be available to address this issue, although it is not a complete fix.

"This hotfix driver should resolve most of the stuttering reported by users; using GPU monitoring utilities (such as EVGA Precision X/MSI Afterburner) in the background while playing VR games will still cause some stutter, but the hotfix driver will be an improvement over recent drivers," Guzman wrote.

Nvidia is still working on a full fix to eliminate SteamVR stuttering even when using a GPU monitoring utility in the background, but Guzman said there is no ETA on its arrival yet.

Meanwhile, hotfixes currently available address several game crashing issues and other bugs. Here is the full list:

The hotfixes are based on the 461.09 driver that Nvidia released a few weeks ago and are primarily focused on fixing newly discovered security flaws.

Keep in mind that the hotfix does not appear in GeForce Experience, nor does it appear on Nvidia's main driver download page. In this case, if you are experiencing the above problem and want to resolve it ASAP, head to this 461.33 support page and download the hotfix. Otherwise, please stay tuned, as the next driver update will have the same fix.