VaM 1.x Enabling soft body physics makes CPU usage go down to 50%

[imaw47]

I'm running on a very old PC with an i5 4460 and a GTX 1060 with 16 2x8 GB of DDR3 RAM.
I'm only using it in Desktop mode, and I notice that my CPU and GPU usage only go as high as about 60%. I've tested on other games, and I found out that they can fully utilize my CPU and GPU.
And one day, while I was messing around in VaM, I unchecked the Soft Body Physics box, and BAM! My FPS doubled. I knew that the SBP is very expensive on the CPU, but disabling it makes my CPU and GPU usage go up to almost 100%. I knew that it was taxing on the CPU, but I didn't know that it was actually throttling it.
Is it because my CPU is too outdated?
I'm going to build a new PC soon, and I'm thinking about something like R5 5600 and RX 7600.
Does anyone have a similar experience with the Soft Body Physics?

 

[hazmhox]

There is no instance where soft body enabled would lend you better performances than without it unless there's something glitching somewhere.
Soft body physics can almost divide your framerate by two on some PCs.

So without knowing your actual settings and specific test case, it's hard to conclude that soft body active is actually better in every possible situation.

 

[SlimerJSpud]

Most likely, you were CPU bound with SBP on, so performance would have been terrible because of that. If your system ran low on main memory and started paging, neither CPU or GPU would have been fully used. I did a new build earlier this year. I can regularly get 60-100 FPS in desktop mode with SBP on. In fact, turning it off doesn't make much difference, so I tend to leave it on. I've noticed some things, like BJ and BodyLanguage scenes work better with it on, less clipping.

My old one was a Core i7 7700K with a GTX 1070. On some scenes, I would barely get 15 FPS. The new one is a Core i9 14900KF with a RTX 5070 Ti. Big difference...

 

[imaw47]

There is no instance where soft body enabled would lend you better performances than without it unless there's something glitching somewhere.
Soft body physics can almost divide your framerate by two on some PCs.

So without knowing your actual settings and specific test case, it's hard to conclude that soft body active is actually better in every possible situation.

Most likely, you were CPU bound with SBP on, so performance would have been terrible because of that. If your system ran low on main memory and started paging, neither CPU or GPU would have been fully used. I did a new build earlier this year. I can regularly get 60-100 FPS in desktop mode with SBP on. In fact, turning it off doesn't make much difference, so I tend to leave it on. I've noticed some things, like BJ and BodyLanguage scenes work better with it on, less clipping.

My old one was a Core i7 7700K with a GTX 1070. On some scenes, I would barely get 15 FPS. The new one is a Core i9 14900KF with a RTX 5070 Ti. Big difference...

Is it possible that my RAM is bottlenecking the whole thing?
DDR3 is pretty slow, and if you tell me that the 7th-gen i7, which only supports the ram speed up to 2400MHz, struggles to calculate physics in some scenes,
Or maybe it's that the CPU cache is too small and it has to wait for the cache to be available, that's why it can only work at 50%, the L3 cache on my i5 is only 8mb.

 

[hazmhox]

Don't overthink this, RAM is not gonna bottleneck anything nowadays... that's not like games really rely on RAM first and foremost since quite a few years now.
You gotta understand that VAM is slow as fuck. Even with a very good gear, you load a two girl + 1 dude scene with a bit of intense animation, the best you can hope in VR is sub 50fps if you push everything to the max.

I don't know what produces what you saw with your test scene, but you gotta do so more test / samples to actually be able to make a conclusion out of this.

 

[SlimerJSpud]

Start Windows Task Manager before you start Vam. Get Vam to where it's really crawling along, then Alt-Tab to Task Manager. Look at the Performance page. Something on that page might be a clue to what the real bottleneck is.

 

[DJ]

I'm running on a very old PC with an i5 4460 and a GTX 1060 with 16 2x8 GB of DDR3 RAM.
I'm only using it in Desktop mode, and I notice that my CPU and GPU usage only go as high as about 60%. I've tested on other games, and I found out that they can fully utilize my CPU and GPU.
And one day, while I was messing around in VaM, I unchecked the Soft Body Physics box, and BAM! My FPS doubled. I knew that the SBP is very expensive on the CPU, but disabling it makes my CPU and GPU usage go up to almost 100%.

In Vam, physics runs on a single thread. When you had soft body physics enables, that thread was the bottleneck, so your GPU is idle some of the time. One CPU core was running at 100%, and the other cores didn't have much to do, so your "CPU usage" (which is the average of how busy your cores are) is only 60% or so.

When you disabled soft body physics, the workload for the physics thread dropped significantly. It's no longer the bottleneck, so the rest of your system isn't spending so much time idle, waiting for physics calculations to be completed. Your framerate goes up, your GPU and the other CPU cores start working harder, so usage stats go up.

If you really want to see what's going on with your CPU, you need a utility that shows how busy each core is, not just a single "cpu usage" number.

But in the end, if CPU and GPU are both showing close to 100% usage, your settings are well balanced. Whatever individual process is the bottleneck isn't slowing the rest of the system down by much.

 

[hazmhox]

When you disabled soft body physics

That's the problem!
He says he did not disabled SBP but he actually enabled SBP and says he's reaching more CPU usage and better framerates.

Which seems absolutely impossible to me for all I know :']

 

[DJ]

That's the problem!
He says he did not disabled SBP but he actually enabled SBP and says he's reaching more CPU usage and better framerates.

Which seems absolutely impossible to me for all I know :']

Read it again. he says " I unchecked the Soft Body Physics box"