I'll probably get laughed at for this combination lol, but I'm using a 5070 TI with a Ryzen 3 3300x, 32GB 3600cl16 RAM, and a 2TB SATA SSD for VAM. I'm planning on upgrading to AM5 soon, with either a 7600x3D, 7700x or 7800x3D. I'm leaning towards the 7600x3D, as it's only $200 atm and roughly 95% equivalent to the 8-core variant. So many people jump to the 9800x3D but I really don't need the absolute "best of the best", as I'm perfectly happy with losing 5-7% in performance and saving $200.
That said, I've been impressed with the 3300x; I mean I've been able to play everything I could want on my 65" LG C1 at glorious 4k. I think that if I were playing at lower resolutions, I would have a much bigger bottleneck. Even when I put this combination into a bottleneck calculator online, it said there was less than a 5% bottleneck at 4k lol. A 4-core CPU from 2020 has been able to give me perfectly playable framerates in everything I play at 4k, go figure
Previously I was using it with a 3070 at 1440p and that combo also ran great the whole time. Then again, I never bother to look at my fps very often and tend to only check it if I'm noticing a game isn't running smoothly or if there's stuttering, etc.
Now when it comes to Virt-a-Mate, I'm pretty sure I'm getting decent fps because most of the scenes that I watch run smoothly enough for me. I think it could definitely be smoother, but I think that is largely due to the fact that my vam folder has like 5k+ files in the "everyone" section lol. I'm not really sure how to go about optimizing vam, tho I would like to do that sometime. I also get the occasional crash, which has happened maybe 15x tops in 200+ hours — it's usually when I've been running vam for a long time and have been editing a scene with a lot of assets and/or plugins. So I guess I would just say that I'm able to run my favorite scenes and insert my own custom looks to my satisfaction.
To provide an example of the type of performance I get — let's say I load up VSR (no intro) — I would guess that it takes around 2-3 minutes to load into the scene. I usually have the bar at the top set to 0.75, with everything but high quality physics turned on, physics cap set to 2 or 3, lights set to 3-4, and that's all I can recall. I think I usually get around 35fps in more complex scenes, such as VSR or the RealFeel full version. Sometimes I have to play with some settings to make asset heavy scenes run more smoothly. With less complex scenes that don't have lots of assets or environments, such as those from Kitty Mocap, I get closer to 50-60fps. I also get playable fps in Damarmau's (spelling?) legendary scenes, which is awesome cuz they are some of my favoritess.
