Need Help Optimizing VaM VR Performance with High-End PC

[Bernom]

Hey everyone! I'm new around here. I discovered VaM five days ago and I'm completely hooked. I've already downloaded nearly 100GB of content and spent about 40 hours learning the software, so I’ve gotten pretty comfortable with it. However, I still have questions—especially about optimization.

First off, apologies if this is a repeat post. I've looked around a lot but haven't found a thread that specifically helps with my issue, so I'll share my PC specs and describe the problem:

• CPU: i7-8700K @ 3.70GHz
• RAM: 64GB (Windows 10)
• GPU: RTX 4080

The problem is that I'm really struggling with low FPS. If I’m lucky, on very simple scenes I can reach almost 30 FPS, but if the scene is even slightly more complex, I drop to around 10 FPS. And, well, it takes a lot of imagination to watch everything move in slow, choppy frames—especially the physics on soft body parts like butt, breasts, legs, etc., which sometimes even deform due to the low framerate.

I've tried advice from several posts, paid for a Patreon plugin that supposedly improves loading times (hoping it might help overall), switched to a new faster SSD, lowered the resolution in SteamVR (I’m using an HTC Vive Pro 2), followed another post’s suggestions to reduce hair physics and tweak other settings, and also played with Preferences. But to gain a few frames, I have to drastically reduce quality—and at that point I’m torn between having a nice-looking avatar at 10 FPS or a “sexy polygon” at 40 FPS.

Nothing seems to solve it, and I'm surprised because with such a powerful GPU and a decent CPU, I would expect better performance. I know there are more technical guides out there, but I'm a fairly average user and don’t really understand overclocking or complex system tweaks. I’m certain I'm missing something important. I've seen people with weaker PCs getting much better performance, so maybe something isn’t configured correctly on my PC or GPU. In Desktop Mode, performance is fine, but in VR, most scenes feel like I’m on a quest to find lost FPS.

Thanks in advance for your time and help! As soon as I get more proficient with the software, I’d love to start creating my own scenes.

 

[atani]

A rule of thumb is to expect half the FPS on VR compared to desktop use when in a similar use in the same scene. This of course is a gross estimate but still quite useful to handle expectations.
The paid plugin you mention for loading times is irrelevant for this, it probably won't help you much unless you have many hundreds of GB of content and takes forever for VaM to load. I would then revert to defaults in steamVR and VaM to have a sensible place to test things and compare desktop with VR.

If you to share some data, test with one scene with 2 persons in it, pick something that is reasonably popular. Try in desktop and in VR within the same place more or less, report your FPS results here.

 

[opium1981]

I find that pixel light count and antialiasing have the strongest influence on performance. Pixel light count I keep between 2-3 depending on the scene and what it looks like. Antialiasing I usually turn off or go with 2x. I have about the same hardware as you do, performance wise. Also make sure you look at scene plugins and turn off all those post-processing plugins that some people try to add to it.