Male and female hairs are interchangeable. You just need to put the female hair files in the male hair folders. If they are in a VAR you'll need to extract them first. FYI, VARs are just zip files.
Things are gender-locked because VaM uses Daz models that are not interchangeable. It sucks, but...
Wow, that solved it. I feel so dumb. I could have sworn I had restarted my machine. It works just fine now, even with the higher settings for the monitor. Getting 158 fps with the scene I was testing. Glad it was nothing worse.
As I said in my above post, I have tried changing my desktop resolution to 1080 and 60hz, but it doesn't seem to make a difference. I am wondering if the latest Nvidia update might have had anything to do with it.
I've been using VaM in desktop mode for ages. On my old 1080p monitors, I was getting anywhere up to 200 fps on some scenes, even with max settings.
I have recently bought a pair of 144 hz curved monitors. They are set to 2560x1440 resolution and 144 hz. When I run VaM it can't get much higher...