Terrible VR performance, good desktop performance

Screenshot of profiler: https://gyazo.com/5e510268ddcb00b7f2d495d1f1ce7f11

1.6M vertices / 1.3M triangles is probably too high when rendering at the high resolution and with the tighter timing requirements of VR. Can you get it below 1M of each?

Will try to reduce that, but I'm not totally sure if its related.  Even reducing it causes framerate drop.  What is VR.WaitForGPU? It takes up a massive amount of time.

Tried optimizing extensively.  I feel like its something random.  5.4.3b22 not working right?  I shouldn't be using native Unity VR support? (though I've used OVR and it was the same).  I'm missing a specific setting?  Vsync?

Or maybe its the SDK?

What is VR.WaitForGPU? It takes up a massive amount of time.

That's when the CPU is waiting for the GPU. The solution is to put less work on the GPU.

Thanks Dave - is there any reason it would run fine in the Editor (VR enabled) and not when a build is made?

I turned off my terrain and tried some things, and it runs smoothly.  As soon as I make a build and try that, it judders like crazy.

No. If anything, the editor typically performs worse than standalone. Maybe it's on a different quality level? Check the quality settings.

Dave - in case anyone else hits a similar issue, we discovered this was due to a specific camera effect (Horizontal Based Ambient Occlusion).  Very important to look at every camera effect as the compatibility with VR is limited.  Thanks!

There are a lot of performance optimization methods that you have to go through to get a decent refresh rate out of gear VR. 
Make sure that you have less than 100k triangles per frame - low poly models
less than 50 set pass calls- sharing same materials among models
Use as few textures as possible 
Bake lightmaps for static objects - This made a huge difference in set pass calls for my project 
Also use one scripting language for the whole project.