I have not been experiencing the stutters you have Gerry. (well I do in certain situations, See below) I will say that my R9 290 has me putting setting near the low to middle end of the settings in most games I am playing in VR though. VR being still in in its infancy shows in some of the problems I have been having in certain games, like Xing for example. Resolution was terrible at first. Turns out the program had the wrong Super Sampling minimum set and I had to manually set it to get the crisp graphics I was hoping for.
BTW, speaking about super sampling (SS). I can't seem to run many, if any, games using more than 1.0 SS. Once I set the SS to something higher I start to get stutter. I imagine it is possible to crank the SS up with a more powerful card, I've seen guys claiming to have as high as 2.0 SS enabled in their games. But for now I am not in the position of being able to purchase a new card. I likely wont be for the foreseeable future either. I'll simply have to make due with my old card.
Is it possible Gerry that you had your SS up too high and it was causing the stuttering?