Question Quickly degrading performance every launch

[jstdrwit]

I can't seem to find an answer for this, hoping my situation isn't unique:

When I first load VAM, I have good performance (all things considered, given it's VAM). However, as I use the program, my FPS drops like steep mountain. I'll go from 90+ FPS down to 10-20 FPS in the first 10 minutes of using the program. This is independent of how many models I load, what plugins I load, or what my graphics settings are. In fact, once the FPS tanks, dropping my graphics settings provides negligient improvements to performance. Once I'm down to 20 FPS, dropping to 'Low' will at best bring it up to 25.

Has anyone encountered this? Any ideas on what this could be? It quite obviously is ruining the experience for me.

FWIW, here's my rig:
AMD 3960x Threadripper
256 GB 3600mhz DDR4
Asus RTX 3080ti
Windows 10
About eight total NVMe's for storage, with VAM running on Samsung Pro NVMe

Given my specs, I should be able to contend with this application quite fiercely.

Any help is much appreciated!

 

[Fferrett]

I think your problem is having too much money.... Most of us would like having "some" of that rig.

Are you trying to run through an HMD or a monitor? Assuming you have your mainboard chipset drivers and all other current, Windows 10 patched etc..
What are your VAM quality settings that you are attempting? Have you tried give_me_fps session plugin?

 

[MacGruber]

Have you tried monitoring your CPU/GPU temperature while running VaM? For example using HWMonitor?
It may be possible that your machine gets just too hot after a while and just has to throttle down as an emergency measure to protect your hardware.

Also VaM is way more taxing, or taxing in a different way, that most other software or games. VaM can only make use of like 2-3 of your 24 CPU cores. You need raw single core CPU power, which is like the opposite of what you buy a Threadripper for.

 

[TToby]

Interesting issue, and definitely not a normal behavior.
If you read through the Benchmark thread, you will find some entries with quite similar PCs.
They are all over 20 fps, by the way. I would suggest to do a full benchmark run, too, and to monitoring your
system specs like temperature and clocking while doing this.

Benchmark Result Discussion

By the way, does someone know if a look, created with a lot of mophs from different var files, will still look as intended, if I turn the morph-preload off? Can a scene or preset load those morphs anyways, or are they completely switched off and/or invisible? I think I have to try this out...

hub.virtamate.com

Like MacGruber allready said, degrading performance over a short time while running a very demanding game,
is very likely to be a heat issue. Other things would be possible, but most likely not in this short time on modern PCs. As you may already know, especially your GPU is producing a LOT of heat. The more power, the more heat. This heat has to be transported to outside of your PC case. This very simple rule holds true, even for the best and newest hardware.
For me it is a AMD rx6090 xt and seven 14" fans blowing constantly air through two big radiators of my custom watercooling loop... Almost no way to get away with a "silent PC" and a closed PC case, for instance.
But it can be some other simple things like insufficient thermal paste, or running additional apps (maybe streaming software) in the background, too.

We would need some more details for a more precise answer.
What are the apps that running in the background?
Are you using VR? Which resolution? What scenes are you trying to run?
What are you benchmark results? What are your temperature and clocking while running it?

 

[AWWalker]

Def sounds like hardware issue, I have a Aorus 1080 Ti and have to run the fan at 100% or it heats up quickly, but at 100% fans no issues. And yeah, closed case, bad for me as well. Hate to say as well, it could be background apps, malware, pupware. Do as they suggest above, more cooling, get an app for your GPU and monitor the temperature and GPU utilization, also CPU. You have a deadly rig and shouldn't be having this problem. I run ~30 degrees Celsius cooler when the fan is on manual at 100%, (and i forgot i had daz studio in background in iRay render mode. so it should be even cooler)

With the hairRender sim:
64 degrees auto controlled
36 degrees on average manual 100% fan

 

[durkin2]

You may also want to check the Bios settings and look at your memory settings. It maybe that your settings on memory clocking are incorrect for the load.
I think VAM wants to use ALL of the available RAM.

 

[jstdrwit]

Have you tried monitoring your CPU/GPU temperature while running VaM? For example using HWMonitor?
It may be possible that your machine gets just too hot after a while and just has to throttle down as an emergency measure to protect your hardware.

Also VaM is way more taxing, or taxing in a different way, that most other software or games. VaM can only make use of like 2-3 of your 24 CPU cores. You need raw single core CPU power, which is like the opposite of what you buy a Threadripper for.

I ran the scene BJC V0.9.1 on desktop, which is a male and female model in almost complete darkness with some control sliders. I started on Medium graphics settings, and I also loaded up GiveMeFPS and chose "Recommended" option. The following observations were made:

25-28 FPS at idle.
If I look around quickly, FPS drops to 14.
GPU usage varies between 25-50%, 65 degrees C
Memory usage at 13%
CPU usage at 13%, 60 degrees C

Pretty frustrating.

 

[Fferrett]

These guys are right about heat - we'd have to know more about how you are dealing with that.

I'm running a single loop going through two rads in a positive pressure setup for an EVGA Hydro Copper RTX 2080 Super and Ryzen 9 3900X on an ASUS Prime x570-Pro with VAM on a 1TB Samsung 970 Pro NVMe. My biggest complaint is VAM's slow load times for a large content library. Once it's loaded, it seems to be possible to run even C&G 3-actor scenes without much quality compromise.

If you're running wet, did your pump fail or become unplugged? Make sure you're moving that fluid.

 

[jstdrwit]

These guys are right about heat - we'd have to know more about how you are dealing with that.

I'm running a single loop going through two rads in a positive pressure setup for an EVGA Hydro Copper RTX 2080 Super and Ryzen 9 3900X on an ASUS Prime x570-Pro with VAM on a 1TB Samsung 970 Pro NVMe. My biggest complaint is VAM's slow load times for a large content library. Once it's loaded, it seems to be possible to run even C&G 3-actor scenes without much quality compromise.

If you're running wet, did your pump fail or become unplugged? Make sure you're moving that fluid.

I think we started a reply around the same time. I posted above confirmation that heat is not the issue

 

[TToby]

The CPU usage may be misleading, because VaM only uses 1-3 cores at max and 65C at 25% GPU usage seems somewhat high to me... though, still OK. I have 60-65C at 100% at the end of the Benchmark test. Even if the CPU shows 13% usage, it may be the case that 1-3 of your 24 cores are running at 100%. This may lead to a severe CPU bottleneck at low screen resolutions and would explain why quality settings have no effect. There are tools to show the usage per core.

But lets say that heat and CPU usage is maybe no issue, then we need more informations to be able to help you. The strange thing is the slow degrading!

Please close every unnecessary application you may run at the background, No browser, no tuning tool, no case LED steering, no Citrix Workspace, ... nothing else than HWinfo or GPU/CPUz and VaM, even if it seems unimportant to you.
This is most of the time the reason for issues with VaM and other games.

Please create a brand new VaM Installation with nothing else than the MacGruber Benchmark and its dependencies added, on a drive that is not your system drive. Dont use GiveMeFPS for this test. We have to eleminate every other factor.
The Benchmark was created exactly for situations like this and to allow us to compare the results.
Please share the screenshot with us and the monitoring values like heat, HW usage AND clocking.

There are other things that make you GPU/CPU throttle besides temperature throttling.
Power throttling, frequency throttling, aso.
Is your PSU potent enough to feed your hardware? I would say at least it should be >700W and not too old. Have you connected both power cables to the GPU? Is this maybe an Y-cable instead of two separate cables?
The most dramatic result of a weak PSU is when the PC suddenly crashes down, but there are other more subtle effects. Most modern GPUs try to keep a balance between voltage, frequency and temperature.
If one of those values are too high, this could lead to throttling.
So, if your GPU clocking frequency is too high, because of aggressive overclocking for instance, the GPU may throttle even at low temperatures.

There may be other very unpleasant reasons for throttling, like faulty or missplaced VRMs (voltage regulation modules), hardware defects, aso, but lets keep with the things we can repair.

The 3080 GPUs are working at a core temperature, that is very hard up to the maximum temperature for the RAM modules, for instance. The real core temperature can be higher than the measured temperature.
But everything below 80-90C "should" be still fine. But keep that at the back of your mind.

PCI lanes: If you plug a lot of devices at your mainboard, like many m.2/NVMEs, you maybe reach the limit of bandwidth your PCI lanes can handle and the databus of your GPU (and maybe CPU) will be reduced.
Please check the motherboard manual for this.
Some bad BIOS settings can have similar limitating effects.

VaM is very performance hungry and not well optimized to make full use of modern hardware.
There are many things that can easily destroy your performance in VaM, like physics-heavy hair, too much light sources or unoptimized clothes. Some GPU quality settings can draw down your fps enormous, too
But lets say it like it is: 25 fps at desktop resolution with a simple scene and with your hardware is simply much too low.

 

[AWWalker]

You could run sysinternals procmon and monitor all the file read and writes associated with VAM. Could be a corrupt file, or something that is constantly failing to load over and over.

Process Monitor - Windows Sysinternals | Microsoft Docs

Great tool for isolating a process and looking at file and registry access. I've used it numerous times in DAZ to identify morphs that cause slow loads for G8F.

** Also try emptying the cache in VAM and re-enabling it.

** One last thing i can also suggest, save the scene that is causing the issue as a new package. Create a new Vam installation. Make a new root folder and put the VAM updater in it, let it install VAM there to create a fresh install of VAM.
Run VAM with defaults at first and test out performance with vanilla structure.

If performance is not an issue, and it runs fine, you may be looking at an addon or custom create file of your own that could be hosing VAM in the original folder. If performance was fine in VAM vanilla, add the package you saved for a scene in the afflicted VAM install that causes a problem, and see if it does it in a fresh vanilla install. If it still runs fine, i would bet money on it being a file in the original folder structure somewhere.

I've been here in the past, I just slowly ported to the new file/folder structure of the fresh VAM install. Not ideal, but if it gets the job done, sometimes it's easier than finding the offending file or issue. But Definitely try a new install folder, you can have multiple on the same system. And from the specs you posted above, i'm pretty sure that rig should have enough space to do this test.

If all of that still produces an issue, you're most definitely looking at a hardware/driver/resource contention issue.

Good luck.

 

[keycode]

I can't seem to find an answer for this, hoping my situation isn't unique:

When I first load VAM, I have good performance (all things considered, given it's VAM). However, as I use the program, my FPS drops like steep mountain. I'll go from 90+ FPS down to 10-20 FPS in the first 10 minutes of using the program. This is independent of how many models I load, what plugins I load, or what my graphics settings are. In fact, once the FPS tanks, dropping my graphics settings provides negligient improvements to performance. Once I'm down to 20 FPS, dropping to 'Low' will at best bring it up to 25.

Has anyone encountered this? Any ideas on what this could be? It quite obviously is ruining the experience for me.

FWIW, here's my rig:
AMD 3960x Threadripper
256 GB 3600mhz DDR4
Asus RTX 3080ti
Windows 10
About eight total NVMe's for storage, with VAM running on Samsung Pro NVMe

Given my specs, I should be able to contend with this application quite fiercely.

Any help is much appreciated!

- is this (serious) issue coming out "just" during Vam playing or it (bad performance) can happen with other programs (standard windows benchmarks, Daz3d rendering, 3d games, etc.) ?
- who was assembling this monster desktop?
- supposing you assembled it, is it the first time for you?

ps: I was never a frame per second maniac, but ... this situation of your is really a lot curious. I would try what Walker told you. And me too I wish you good luck.

 

[jstdrwit]

So... I figured it out. TToby, AWWalker, and others touched on it. I remember making a second copy of VAM to shrink down the resources, as my original copy is flooded. However, the performance was bad there, too. What I didn't do, and eventually realized this, is run VAMUpdater and download a fresh copy.

FPS is still not what it should be, but I understand that VAM is unique. I just got the VAM 2 Alpha last night and I was getting 170+, so I can at least be excited for the progression of VAM in general. In VAM 1, my FPS on a fresh copy is quite variable but always above 30. With a single model, I can run max and get about 60.

All is well. A sincere thank you to everyone who took the time to help someone out. I was pulling my hair out over this one.

Cheers

 

[HolySchmidt]

You could get much higher framerates with a new CPU. But I'm sure you have your reasons for the Threadripper

 

[TToby]

I am happy that you figured it out, but...
I am still somewhat unsatisfied with the outcome of this thread.
In a scene with one single figure, I've got similar or more fps in VR (I still don't know which screen resolution you are using) with my 8 years old 4790k/gtx980ti.
Especially those "slow degrading performance" still bothers me.
But lets bring this to an end. If you are satisfied, then everything is fine.
Lets take this as a good example, how hard it is to hunt down issues with VaM installations and that you can endlessly throw money on VaM 1.x without squeezing out significantly more performance.

 

[AWWalker]

Yay! Always fun when you can apply work experience to pron. and Vice versa lol.

 

[jstdrwit]

I am happy that you figured it out, but...
I am still somewhat unsatisfied with the outcome of this thread.
In a scene with one single figure, I've got similar or more fps in VR (I still don't know which screen resolution you are using) with my 8 years old 4790k/gtx980ti.
Especially those "slow degrading performance" still bothers me.
But lets bring this to an end. If you are satisfied, then everything is fine.
Lets take this as a good example, how hard it is to hunt down issues with VaM installations and that you can endlessly throw money on VaM 1.x without squeezing out significantly more performance.

I would love to optimize further! I just noticed one of my NVME drives was causing a bunch of errors in Windows. Not the drive with VAM but I imagine that still throws things off. I'm repairing it now and will test again later.

@HOolySchmidt - I highly doubt it would be more than a 20% difference or so with like a 5950x

 

[HolySchmidt]

With a 5950x you could actually expect a 20% something boost in FPS:
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-Ryzen-TR-3960X-vs-AMD-Ryzen-9-5950X/m969111vs4086

Just look at the single core performance cause that's anything that counts. But I was talking more about a 12700K for example:
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-Ryzen-TR-3960X-vs-Intel-Core-i7-12700K/m969111vs4119

That would be nearly a 50% boost in FPS, depending on the scene of course. Everything without any guarantee from my side, but switching from a 9700K to a 12700K I got pretty accurate more FPS equal to more single core performance as stated.

 

[jstdrwit]

I am happy that you figured it out, but...
I am still somewhat unsatisfied with the outcome of this thread.
In a scene with one single figure, I've got similar or more fps in VR (I still don't know which screen resolution you are using) with my 8 years old 4790k/gtx980ti.
Especially those "slow degrading performance" still bothers me.
But lets bring this to an end. If you are satisfied, then everything is fine.
Lets take this as a good example, how hard it is to hunt down issues with VaM installations and that you can endlessly throw money on VaM 1.x without squeezing out significantly more performance.

This damn application is driving me insane. I figured out a bunch of things that were causing issues, one of which was a bad sector on my NVMe, and things improved dramatically.

Then, literally out of nowhere, the game runs TERRIBLE. 4x MSAA puts my 3080ti to 100% and drops FPS to 3 or 4. Yes, three or four.

There seems to be no rhyme or reason to how this program behaves... It's driving me nuts, and after 3-4 months of using it I've still barely been able to scratch the surface of it due to performance issues. There's also little to no documentation on how to optimize.

I've updated drivers, reinstalled fresh and on a different drive, run barebones, ran repair, fresh windows install, upgraded from win 10 to 11, overclocked, underclocked, stopped virtually every service and program prior to running the program, rolled back old drivers, etc. etc. etc. etc.

I'm afraid I might be at the end of the road.

 

[jstdrwit]

This damn application is driving me insane. I figured out a bunch of things that were causing issues, one of which was a bad sector on my NVMe, and things improved dramatically.

Then, literally out of nowhere, the game runs TERRIBLE. 4x MSAA puts my 3080ti to 100% and drops FPS to 3 or 4. Yes, three or four.

There seems to be no rhyme or reason to how this program behaves... It's driving me nuts, and after 3-4 months of using it I've still barely been able to scratch the surface of it due to performance issues. There's also little to no documentation on how to optimize.

I've updated drivers, reinstalled fresh and on a different drive, run barebones, ran repair, fresh windows install, upgraded from win 10 to 11, overclocked, underclocked, stopped virtually every service and program prior to running the program, rolled back old drivers, etc. etc. etc. etc.

I'm afraid I might be at the end of the road.

Scene with a single model, set on Ultra Low but also using GiveMeFPS (Recommended), I get 49 FPS while moving with model in view.

From there, if I manually go in and turn every setting to max but leave MSAA to OFF, I get 42 FPS while moving with model in view.

If I move MSAA to even 2x, I drop to 7 FPS. 4x, 3-4 FPS. 8x and it's so catastrophic that I can't even click it off.

 

[TToby]

This damn application is driving me insane. I figured out a bunch of things that were causing issues, one of which was a bad sector on my NVMe, and things improved dramatically.

Then, literally out of nowhere, the game runs TERRIBLE. 4x MSAA puts my 3080ti to 100% and drops FPS to 3 or 4. Yes, three or four.

There seems to be no rhyme or reason to how this program behaves... It's driving me nuts, and after 3-4 months of using it I've still barely been able to scratch the surface of it due to performance issues. There's also little to no documentation on how to optimize.

I've updated drivers, reinstalled fresh and on a different drive, run barebones, ran repair, fresh windows install, upgraded from win 10 to 11, overclocked, underclocked, stopped virtually every service and program prior to running the program, rolled back old drivers, etc. etc. etc. etc.

I'm afraid I might be at the end of the road.

That is very sad to read, and I really want to help you, but I am running out of ideas.

-Important: Run the Mac Gruber Benchmark. Some users are saying their have low fps, some others say they have much fps, but when comparing the Benchmark, then they have maybe similar performance.
Though, none of them have those up and downs and fps as low as 4fps...

-I don't know if I allready said this, but if you (or other readers) use VR: Have an eye on those Supersampling sliders.
Supersampling is a methode to enhance the quality of your image. Many TVs are doing this too. The image is rendered way higher than the native display resolution, then being converted back for the display. This can result in better visuals. Many VR hmds do this allready by default, so please be careful with those sliders.
There is a Supersampling slider in VaM, and there is a Supersampling slider in SteamVR, and I bet there is a similar one in the Oculus software. Attention: Those slider values will multiply!!! So if you have your VaM SS slider on 2x and the SteamVR slider on 200%, then you will end up with 400% higher resolution like normal.

-Hardware: The best thing to find issues with your Hatdware is to do different Benchmarks, monitoring your clock and temperature, and compare those values with others. Many Benchmarks, like the Time Spy Benchmark are doing some comparison automatically for you.
There are several testing tools for your drives or RAM memory, for instance. Use old things like Window's FDisk, too. If one of your RAM modules is defective, this can lead to strange errors, maybe your mainboard has PCI issues, or you have problems with heat.
-There are a lot of things that can go wrong with hardware settings in the BIOS. Some tuning tools might automatically do strange things. For one user the RAM modules are clocking only on base speed, for an other user the CPU never boosts up and always runs on low speed, aso. There are many tutorials on the internet on this. Not all are equally useful.

-VaM: As you allready know, the current old VaM version doesn't fully utilize your top hardware. Especially the CPU.
It only rund 1 to 3 of your CPU cores, so single core speed is the key, not the ammount of cores.
There is an old thread on "optimizing" VaM, but this more or less lists all the things that do use a lot of performance.
Multiple light sources, multiple figures, unoptimized and performance heavy hair (!), clothes with too much polygones PLUS physics.... aso. This, and some of the user settings, are all you can optimize to get better performance. BUT (as long as you don't try a scene with 8 figures and 24 lights), with your hardware, this should not be a huge difference like from 120fps to 4fps!

 

[keycode]

I can't seem to find an answer for this, hoping my situation isn't unique:

When I first load VAM, I have good performance (all things considered, given it's VAM). However, as I use the program, my FPS drops like steep mountain. I'll go from 90+ FPS down to 10-20 FPS in the first 10 minutes of using the program. This is independent of how many models I load, what plugins I load, or what my graphics settings are. In fact, once the FPS tanks, dropping my graphics settings provides negligient improvements to performance. Once I'm down to 20 FPS, dropping to 'Low' will at best bring it up to 25.

Has anyone encountered this? Any ideas on what this could be? It quite obviously is ruining the experience for me.

FWIW, here's my rig:
AMD 3960x Threadripper
256 GB 3600mhz DDR4
Asus RTX 3080ti
Windows 10
About eight total NVMe's for storage, with VAM running on Samsung Pro NVMe

Given my specs, I should be able to contend with this application quite fiercely.

Any help is much appreciated!

did you take away those many plastic transparent protections from your 3080ti ? (<<< just kidding, sorry) A lot (very very much time ago) I had problems with a ssd (but it was NOT a samsung ) ...then the (tragic) issue was ALWAYS evident with every task of my system. What I don't understand is if this serious vam performance dropping is the only bad situation you get with your assembled pc. And who was assembling it? ps: 256GB RAM????? 8 internal nvme (eight?????????????) ... no professional soundblaster card (sorry for being sarcastic)? of one thing you can be sure: vam has nothing (really nothing at all) to do with that fps dropping.

 

[TToby]

Yes, those many NVME are a bit scary. If you have tried everything else, you mayby can try to plug out all of them except the system drive plus the VaM drive.

 

[HolySchmidt]

I would try to cut down the cpu cores for VaM to 4, then 2, then 1. Just a shot in the dark.
If it does something: perfect. If not: nothing is lost.

Maybe VaM has some trouble with threadripper in general, I don't know. Nonetheless: VaM is not the problem here. We all know that it's unoptimized but if your system is ok than VaM should run approximately fine.

btw: MSAA is a performance killer, not only within VaM. 2x should work without big performance issues with a 3080ti as I use 2x with a 3080 myself.

 

[jstdrwit]

did you take away those many plastic transparent protections from your 3080ti ? (<<< just kidding, sorry) A lot (very very much time ago) I had problems with a ssd (but it was NOT a samsung ) ...then the (tragic) issue was ALWAYS evident with every task of my system. What I don't understand is if this serious vam performance dropping is the only bad situation you get with your assembled pc. And who was assembling it? ps: 256GB RAM????? 8 internal nvme (eight?????????????) ... no professional soundblaster card (sorry for being sarcastic)? of one thing you can be sure: vam has nothing (really nothing at all) to do with that fps dropping.

I've benchmarked the system. It's lightning fast in literally anything I've thrown at it, aside from VAM.