Too Many Addons Game is Not Launching, Hardware Bottlenecks?

[Potable Water]

Hi, I wanted to ask what is the addon folder size limit? I downloaded a ton of addons and the game doesn't load and is stuck on a black screen whenever I try to boot it in desktop or VR mode. What is the maximum addon folder size where the game can actually boot? Like it boots with around 50 gigs of addons but not when it has several hundreds.

What causes the game to not load? If I get more RAM or a better GPU or CPU would it cause the game to actually boot with a shit ton of addons?

Also, I am getting really shitty FPS like 20-40 in VR and wanted to know what part of the PC is most stressed or bottlenecked? I am assuming GPU like with most games, and I am planning on upgrading my old 1080 to a 50 series card. Is the game heavily RAM or CPU dependant?

Also, I was under the impression that the number of addons does not affect preformance unless the specific addon or character model is loaded into the scene. Is this right or wrong?

 

[atani]

There's no limit, but performance will be worse if you have tons of stuff.

Cannot advise on your situation if you don't share any information about your system.

 

[Potable Water]

There's no limit, but performance will be worse if you have tons of stuff.

Cannot advise on your situation if you don't share any information about your system.

I have an i7 8700k, 16gb of ddr4 ram, and a gtx 1080. Not sure if it matters but I have roughly 2tb free in my 4 and 8tb drives and 10tb in my 16tb drive.
The issue with the game not booting is hardware related then? If I get a new card that would be able to

 

[atani]

I'm a little confused when you say that VaM doesn't load, as in crashes when loading(?), but you also describe your FPS while on scenes. Is the latter based on a small ammount of VARs (50 GB) and the crashing one when you have several GBs?

VaM is mainly CPU intensive for physics, the GPU is for some other things, I never recall what. None would matter for loading VaM, but those 16 GB RAM may be a reason, highly suggested to have 32 GB to reduce crashing considerably. Take a look at your RAM usage when loading VaM to check if this is the cause of the crashing.
If you also use XMP profiles in RAM, try disabling them. To me they made crashes a lot more likely than disabled.

 

[Potable Water]

The crashing on booting up the game is just it staying on a black screen forever. If I try clicking on it it says that the program is not responding and it will crash.

So when I launch the game with 72 gb of addons it takes a while to boot like 5 mins and the RAM useage is around 60-70%. When I am in game it shoots up to like 80-90%.
When I try to launch with hundreds of gb it has the same RAM usage but it doesn't boot in even after I have waited 30mins to an hour. I assume its just super slow load times but it doesn't make sense that it would take over 20x longer without 20x the data.

Theres also the issue I'm running into where the game crashes after I try to load around 5-10 or so scenes. I assume this is a lack of RAM issue.

 

[Mhunter047]

The more VAR packages in your Add-on folder the more things the system has to load into memory. Each VAR will have clothing, hair, textures, poses,looks, and so on, so the more you have in your folder the more that has to be loaded; thus it takes longer to load the game and uses more memory. With the system you have described you will be very limited to what you can run. Two person atoms max and a minimal environment. Also jumping from scene to scene will burn up memory until the game crashes, even just loading different looks has limits based on hardware. To make things better, I would start by creating a fresh install and loading just your favorite scenes in, just a few. Then add the dependencies for those files from the Hub. As for hardware, you definitely need more RAM, 32 gig minimum. That will make a big difference. As for the video card, gains can be made there, but I would suggest going with at least a 3060. I have an AMD equivalent to the 1080 on one computer and it just.... meh. Last but not least, this patch worked wonders for my primary machine and I highly recommend it, although it takes a little bit of work to get it installed and tuned properly. But even untuned it provides a boost (see below). My machine has an old 4 core processor i7 and this makes it work much better. VAM does not naturally use all of the cores and threads of the newer processors and this patch makes it do so. Good luck!

MH

CPU Performance Patch (Up to 30% faster physics, up to 60% more FPS) - Plugins + Scripts -

As requested in this thread https://hub.virtamate.com/threads/benchmark-result-discussion.13131/page-37 here is a release of the cpu performance patch. FAQ at bottom Now Supports VaM 1.22.0.12! Please share before and after benchmarks with...

hub.virtamate.com

 

[MacGruber]

Not sure if it matters but I have roughly 2tb free in my 4 and 8tb drives and 10tb in my 16tb drive.

With those drive sizes you are probably still on mechanical hard drives? You might want to look into getting an SSD, for installing Windows on and at least your most loading-time intense games on. Main benefit of SSDs is the reduced seek time: No need to wait for the disk to spin to get to the location where the data is stored. Modern NVMe SSDs are theoretically like 50-60x faster than mechanical disks, reading 6-7 GB/sec is a normal speed these days. Of course that does not directly translate into VaM loading speed, an old SATA SSD may already be enough. SATA limit is like 600MB/sec, which is still way faster than mechanical drives. And your mainboard might not have the needed M.2 port, so SATA might be the better choice.

Still, with a harddisk loading VaM would just take very long. If it does not boot at all, something else is wrong.

 

[SlimerJSpud]

If you have hardware limitations, never go from one scene right to another. Exit and reload Vam for each scene. This will be slow, but may make it more reliable. Another thing you could do is keep completely separate Vam installs for different kinds of scenes. If you just download anything that pops up, you will continue to have this problem. You could have a very minimal Vam you use for downloading and trying things out. If you decide to keep something, move it to one of the other installs based on the category, then delete it from the "lobby area" Vam. You'll end up with duplicates of the dependencies, but you seem to have disk space to spare.

Either that, or you can keep everything in one giant install, but each time you want to run something, copy the main scene into an empty Vam, start that Vam and let it download all the dependencies it needs. Flush the empty install after each session. This makes more work for you, but less work for the computer.

Old vars you don't use anymore can be moved into a folder that Vam does not look in. Same for Saves\scene.

 

[Potable Water]

Thank you everyone for the advice!
I've been thinking of just upgrading my graphics card in my current 6 year old PC, but I decided when the new 50 series graphics cards come out later this year I'm just gonna build a brand new PC. Vam is by far not the first time my PC is struggling to run a game, most games I'm lucky to get 40-50 fps on medium to low settings and its about damn time I fix it lol. I didn't care for the longest while since I pretty much only play old games which I can still kinda run ok.
In the meantime I'll keep my addon folder small like it was suggested. Funnily enough having a huge 400 ish gig folder did actually end up booting after I left it running all night, I'm assuming it took around 8-10 hours. Once I tried to do anything in a scene it crashed though lol.

 

[SlimerJSpud]

Running out of VRAM in the GPU usually causes an instant crash. (AMHIK) Running out of DRAM on the mobo can cause this behavior where the system starts to swap things to disk. If you want to see what's happening, run Windows Task Manager while Vam is trying to boot up. If your Ram usage exceeds 90%, and your disk usage goes up, the system is in swapping hell. When the game is up, and you cause it to crash by doing something, that means the game needed more in Ram than you had, and swapping couldn't prevent the crash.

 

[Luuube]

I'm having a similar issue. I downloaded addons one after the next for hours. Then my game crashed, and when I tried to open it, it just went to a black screen. After about 20 seconds on the black screen, clicking caused the "Program not responding" error, and it closed VAM. I'm also horrendously underequipped to deal with VAM, running a laptop version of the 2060, with 16 gigs of ram and an i7 2.6ghz processor.

A second install in a separate folder fixed the issue and allows it to launch with the fresh file, albeit without the addons.

 

[SlimerJSpud]

@Luuube you might have a corrupted file in the ton you downloaded. It's painful, but you can back them out in groups to another folder outside of Vam to see if it lets the game boot. Also, any var file that won't open in 7Zip is corrupt. Delete it and try downloading again. For vars that are missing from the hub, you can get an html document with an error instead of the actual var.

 

[Anand]

YES! VAR count (actually to be technically correct - morph count) will bog down your VAM. Without the solutions I describe below, VAM will not load for me just like you. And I have a modern machine.

You'll need to look into something Var Browser or Browser Assist. These solutions will enable you to hide the majority of your VARs from VAM so that it loads and runs fast. Since these are kept "off the books," VAM won't be able to load them. But of course the tools have their own way of letting you load the hidden VARs that you want them.

BTW, I just upgrade from 64GB to 128GB RAM. That did not do squat. Save your money for the NVME drives - big ones. When loading VAM or a scene, VAM moves a sh!t ton of bits. You want this to be as fast as possible.

Oh, and GPU upgrade: meh, not really helpful. My old 1080ti was doing pretty good. My current 4080ti is barely utilised. I have an open bench set up and I can see that the GPU fans HARDLY EVER spin. Windows taskman shows really low GPU utilization. Get a modern GPU if you want to do AI. But don't overspend like I did if you only run VAM.

CPU core clock speed is very important for Unity since the base platform seems to be single threaded. So the faster your clock speed, in theory the faster your VAM. It is harder to achieve higher clock speed with higher core count CPUs. So unless you spend mega dollars and mega watts, your average run of the mill enthusiast CPU will do.

HOWEVER, Turtlebackgoofy's Performance Patch is something else you should look into. It helps parallelize "some" of Unity's tasks so that the CPU load is spread across more cores. So the good news is that with this patch, VAM will actually use more than one core. The reported actual performance gains seem to be all over the map. Some says it helps. Others says not. For me, it's a placebo thing where I feel warm and fuzzy seeing all my cores balls out. Without the patch, only one core is maxed out.