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!

 

[jstdrwit]

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.

What are you, some type of sorceror?????

I only test single-core and four-core thus far... single-core was bad.

But... four-core, with every setting as high is it can go:

You sir are a FREAKING genius. I cannot thank you enough. The level of satisfaction of finally resolving this is fan-freaking-tastic

I owe you BIG time

 

[Sally Whitemane]

@jstdrwit
I suspect the VAM Physics cannot deal with the many cores of Threadripper.
Please enable the performance monitor in VAM that shows the frame times in the top left corner.
Post a screenshot of that when your frames per seconds are low.

Personally I'd try a physics cap of 1 first. If that doesn't help I'd try to run VAM with fewer cores enabled. Something similar to a mainstream system, like 4 cores only.

> Here < was another user in the VAM benchmark thread with a Threadripper 2950X 16 Core. He had similar problems
Maybe you could help each other out.

Sidenote: Hardware Monitor is generally considered a bad tool in the "overclocking community" due to worse hardware support and slow updates.
Instead everybody uses Hardware Info these day. They are similar. For example, HWInfo was the first tool that helped diagnosing the overheating problems with backside memory on RTX 3090s. It was the first to have support for reading that (undocumented, f*ck you Nvidia!) memory-hotspot sensor.

 

[Sally Whitemane]

Guess I'm to late.

If you want to "autostart" VAM with 4 cores / 8 threads create a .bat file with:

cmd.exe /c start "VAM" /affinity FF "full path to VAM.exe"

Spoiler: How the affinity works:

It's converted from binary to hex:

Example: use 1 core/2 threads on a 4 core/8 thread CPU
 binary: 0000 0011 <- right side is first core
    hex:         3

Example: use 4 cores/8 threads on 8 core/16 thread CPU
 binary: 0000 0000 1111 1111 <- first 4 cores/8 threads
    hex:              F    F

1 = 1 core / 1 thread
3 = 1 core / 2 threads
F = 2 cores / 4 threads
3F = 3 cores / 6 threads
FF = 4 cores / 8 threads
FFF = 6 cores / 12 threads
FFFF = 8 cores / 16 threads

 

[jstdrwit]

Guess I'm to late.

If you want to "autostart" VAM with 4 cores / 8 threads create a .bat file with:

cmd.exe /c start "VAM" /affinity FF "full path to VAM.exe"

Spoiler: How the affinity works:

It's converted from binary to hex:

Example: use 1 core/2 threads on a 4 core/8 thread CPU
binary: 0000 0011 <- right side is first core
    hex:         3

Example: use 4 cores/8 threads on 8 core/16 thread CPU
binary: 0000 0000 1111 1111 <- first 4 cores/8 threads
    hex:              F    F

1 = 1 core / 1 thread
3 = 1 core / 2 threads
F = 2 cores / 4 threads
3F = 3 cores / 6 threads
FF = 4 cores / 8 threads
FFF = 6 cores / 12 threads
FFFF = 8 cores / 16 threads

Thanks Sally, this is exactly what I did and it worked! I would've given up long before coming up with this solution on my own. Huge thanks to all that helped

 

[TToby]

You are welcome. Sorry I could't help. I have +35 years experience with PC, but I am an absolute noob when it comes to Threadripper. Never thought this could be the issue, because there are several VaM users playing VaM with Threadrippers.

 

[HolySchmidt]

You sir are a FREAKING genius. I cannot thank you enough. The level of satisfaction of finally resolving this is fan-freaking-tastic

I owe you BIG time

No, you owe me nothing
Glad I could help you.

It was just a suspicion that VaM could maybe not handle either the core-count or the Threadripper architecture cause I know that there's some games out there that can't deal with too many cores (mostly older games).
I was thinking for myself of trying out to run VaM with 4 cores only to find out if that does something to my performance as well. Looks like it's worth a try!

 

[lojepo4410crtsec]

Guess I'm to late.

If you want to "autostart" VAM with 4 cores / 8 threads create a .bat file with:

cmd.exe /c start "VAM" /affinity FF "full path to VAM.exe"

Spoiler: How the affinity works:

It's converted from binary to hex:

Example: use 1 core/2 threads on a 4 core/8 thread CPU
binary: 0000 0011 <- right side is first core
    hex:         3

Example: use 4 cores/8 threads on 8 core/16 thread CPU
binary: 0000 0000 1111 1111 <- first 4 cores/8 threads
    hex:              F    F

1 = 1 core / 1 thread
3 = 1 core / 2 threads
F = 2 cores / 4 threads
3F = 3 cores / 6 threads
FF = 4 cores / 8 threads
FFF = 6 cores / 12 threads
FFFF = 8 cores / 16 threads

Oddly enough, on my CPU (5800x) performance plummets if I select more than 7 threads. Nevertheless this seems like the very first thing one should do when attempting to boost VaM performance, thanks.