Improving fine hair without MSAA x8?

Hi everyone,

I'm having an issue with my character's hair strands (in VR it's worse where there's even flickering). The only fix I've found so far is cranking MSAA up to x8 (in the screenshot below it's set to x2), but that tanks my FPS quite a lot: drops from 200 down to 150–160 (on PC).

Is there any other way to improve anti-aliasing without compromising performance this much? I've tried MacGruber's PostMagic, but it either didn’t help much, and when it did, the FPS hit was just as bad.

Maybe I’ve messed up another setting somewhere.

Has anyone experienced the same thing? and found a fix?



Thanks in advance!

150fps sounds totally ok, though?

In VaM you got two choices to improve hair:

1. Use MSAA...ideally 8x
2. Use the ResolutionScale slider, which only has an effect in VR. It means rendering in higher resolution and then downscale.

Most people probably combine both. Especially on older low-res VR headsets. But ResolutionScale is super expensive. A scale of 1.5 means 2,25x the number of pixels and memory usage. MSAA 8x also means every pixel is rendered 8 times, although due to caching effects its more like 2x the cost.

Anyway, what you can try is combining 2x or 4x MSAA with PostMagic's FXAA. But it won't look as good.

What you really want is DLAA, but VaM 1.x does not have that. In Desktop mode you could use Nvidia DLDSR, if you want, though. Enable in Nvidia driver settings, it will enable a virtual display resolution. Then run VaM with that virtual resolution in full screen mode. (Ok, I have not tried, but it should work) But, if you are already struggling with MSAA...probably forget DLDSR.

Thanks for your response! So it really does come down to just those two solutions (and perhaps a third for desktop). I’ve tried ResolutionScale too, but the FPS drop hits hard. I only play in VR, but since I kept noticing this fine hair flickering even after upgrading to a new rig (5080 + 9950X3D), I’ve been troubleshooting it on desktop. On my Quest 3, FPS can drop as low as 30 (I like mirrors too so it doesn't help), so I’ve been digging into every setting I can. MSAA x8 is one of the few that helps, but anything below that and the hair strands look pretty bad.

Mirrors tank performance hard. The entire scene has to be rendered again, so half performance. You can try reducing the resolution of the mirror. Too many VAR packages with morphs are a thing that affects performance massively as well. Try running with a second "clean" VaM install that has just the few packages you actually need for that scene.

You could also run the Benchmark scene to see what the performance impacts of the different things are exactly on your hardware.
(MSAA, hair-sim, mirrors, cloth-sim, multiple characters, ...)
Also allows you to compare with others who have similar hardware, maybe there is something wrong with the machine?

Tried it with my OC settings (+400, +2000), but it crashed (though playing in VR is stable). So I ran it again on stock settings.
Does it look okay to you based on your experience? Or would you recommend doing a fresh install?

kakashisex said:

Does it look okay to you based on your experience? Or would you recommend doing a fresh install?

Click to expand...

Try to find someone with similar hardware in the discussion thread. Make sure they used version 3, 4 or 5. Otherwise results are not comparable.