Performance in VR

[legitimateaxes]

Hi, I have an i7-12700k and a 3070Ti with Valve Index but even with lowish settings and crappy models (like no sim clothing at all, only 1 person in a scene, very little sim hair) I still get bad enough performance to make VR unpleasant and dizzying. Other VR games perform fine.

Am I doing something wrong? Is there some secret to not get poor, stuttering performance in VR with VAM? All the features are very cool but I can't run them on a pretty expensive setup and that seems kind of weird to me?

Thanks

 

[atani]

Check out the Benchmark Performance thread in General for comparisons with people using similar hardware.

 

[VAMboi]

There are quite a few secrets as you say. Soft body physics, physics rate cap, the number of pixel lights, hairstyles and the number of persons in a scene are probably among the most impactful factors. Then there's post processing effect plugins that will tank fps even more. Main thing to be aware of is that VAM is single threaded and all physics are calculated on the CPU, so you might have a scene with no lights, no sim hair, etc. and still get below 30fps, just because of the physics bottle neck. Posing also can have an effect on fps as it can impact physics as well.

 

[atani]

Today's conversation in Discord was long and detailed about FPS in VaM if anyone's interested:

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About being single-threaded:

From DJ:

Just want to point out that Vam IS multithreaded. The issue is that the Unity version in use requires tons of physics functions all to run on the main thread, which causes a bottleneck. And upgrading to a more modern Unity version would break all existing Vam content.

From Captain Varghoss:

To be even more specific, it's the physx implementation in unity that is not multi-threaded and what causes the most bottlenecking, VaM2 is removing a lot of the processing from physx to avoid this problem, but even the newest version of unity still has single thread operations that will basically keep it from ever using 100% of every core, which most everything has a problem with anyway

 

[legitimateaxes]

There are quite a few secrets as you say. Soft body physics, physics rate cap, the number of pixel lights, hairstyles and the number of persons in a scene are probably among the most impactful factors.

These are good tips, I did some tests after reading posts in this forum a while back and ended up with a few big improvements. For anyone else reading this thread, here's what improved FPS best for me:
- Reduce ass physics as much as possible, especially soft body physics.
- No soft body physics at all
- No sim clothing
- Made a few "fps friendly" hair presets by using non-sim base hair and only making the bangs sim, or just only doing ponytails and pixie cuts
- Only one person in scene
- No interactivity at all, except buttons to change animation presets
- Potato level graphics settings

But, when implementing all these things to get acceptable performance, the actual vr experience is very poor. It's like a VR Nintendo 64 porn game lol. Maybe playstation 2.

I wish I could bake the physics into the animation or something, still wouldn't be interactive but at least the booty would look good right?

 

[VAMboi]

You can get away with soft body physics on one of two characters, also you can keep the hair physics on but reduce the two top sliders in the hair physics tab, this usually helps a lot without trashing the look, specially in a completely dark environment. there's also a really handy setting in hair-look. you can chose between quality or fast settings. If you are dealing with dark hair, fast could help a lot without changing the look too much. I'll stop here and read that thread as I guess most of what I'm saying is explained in better form and detail over there.

 

[VAMboi]

Last couple tips I can say for sure will have an impact is turning off multi-threading in your BIOS. seems really odd but it does improve fps by 10-15% in my case. Other people have talked about that, can't remember where I saw this first. And pose optimization. let's say you have two bodies colliding, If you alter the physic values of the atoms that move the most, by giving them more strength, It can alleviate the physics bottleneck. for example, you could click on hips, go to physics tab and crank up the first slider in the upper left corner, which will make hips "heavier" or harder to move. you could do the same for the head, which in turn would have the hair move less, thus lowering once again the strain of the physics engine.

 

[epi.noah]

Check FastPhysicsDemo. Great looking dance scenes could be made to work in VR with these settings.

Other scenes where interactions require better physics could use presets that get triggered depending on what's needed. epiTemplateLite has a tablet with buttons to do that if you wanna try.