Answered Why is VaM demanding such a quick physics rate for me?

[MSGB8]

I just got this game the other day. I spent two days getting the hang of properly running scenes, and it has just now occurred to me that I've basically been playing in slow motion this entire time. The timeline scenes I downloaded had voices going about 3x as fast as the visuals, and no amount of setting animation tune-ups was fixing it.

Ah, duh, it's cuz the refresh rate must be off. I check it out and it's sitting at 90 Hz. I have a VIVE and that's exactly what the refresh rate is supposed to be for it. In fact, it says it's exactly that on my headset settings screen. But I go back and try out a 45 Hz rate in VaM just to see how close it is, and the spoken dialogue is still a good chunk faster, so I'm guessing my headset is trying to tell me it's running at 30-40 Hz somehow?

I don't understand what's going on, and I'm at a complete loss as to what the issue could possibly be. Any ideas?

 

[MacGruber]

CPU to slow
VaM is probably one of the most demanding games out there. Because nobody with a sane mind would try to simulate soft-body physics, clothing and hair in real time for multiple characters, right? Well, VaM'ers think different I guess You need raw single core CPU power for VaM, lots of CPU cores don't help much. It's supposed to change/improve with VaM 2.X, but that's still a while out.

Things to try:

• You can set the physics rate in the options, so I recommend to try to find a good setting. Note that it might break some scenes that rely on physics, e.g. collision triggered by animation. Ideally the physics rate should be the same or a multiple of your frame rate, so every frame you do one or two physics updates.
• There is also an audio-sync plugin around somewhere which could help, if you got minor desyncs. It just plays audio slightly slower/faster to keep the sync.

 

[MacGruber]

Also worth trying:

Plugins - GiveMeFPS

Session plugin to quickly set ALL person & object options to give more frames per second Allows user to set individual settings themselves Allows setting of performance preferences for easy access Can be set to override scene settings on loading...

hub.virtamate.com

 

[MSGB8]

Bleh, I was hoping that wasn't the case, because running on Ultra Low still gives me 60 FPS, but I suppose it's the answer that makes the most sense. Thanks for the confirmation.

 

[MacGruber]

Bleh, I was hoping that wasn't the case, because running on Ultra Low still gives me 60 FPS, but I suppose it's the answer that makes the most sense. Thanks for the confirmation.

If you run at 60 frames per second and try to do 90 physics updates per second, means every second frame you got to do 2 physic updates. So you get an very unstable frame rate in the best case. Even worse, if you happen to set your physics update cap to 1, it means only one physics update is allowed per frame, causing you to skip every third update. That would explain physics/animations running at 2/3 speed.
If you can run at stable 60fps, I would recommend to set physics to 60Hz as well and physics cap to 2, so in case there is a minor hiccup, you still won't desync as the game can catch up again.

 

[MSGB8]

I would recommend to set physics to 60Hz as well and physics cap to 2, so in case there is a minor hiccup, you still won't desync as the game can catch up again.

This suggestion synced everything up perfectly. Thank you so much for the help!