Wiki Article 01. Performance Tab

User Preferences / Performance Tab



“Quick Quality Settings” are presets you can use to quickly boost your FPS or improve the visual quality of the VaM experience.
There are a variety of choices from “Ultra Low” to “Max” quality.
When you change any of the settings away from the presets it is then set to “Custom”.




”Ultra Low”
“Render Scale” Set to 1.0
“Mirrored Surfaces Enable” - Off
“Realtime Reflection Probes” - Off
“Shader Quality” - Low
“Soft Body Physics” - Off
“MSAA Level” - Off
“Pixel Light Count” - 0
“Smooth Passes” - 1
“Glow Effects” - Off


”Low”
“Render Scale” Set to 1.0
“Mirrored Surfaces Enable” - Off
“Realtime Reflection Probes” - Off
“Shader Quality” - Low
“Soft Body Physics” - Off
“MSAA Level” - 2X
“Pixel Light Count” - 1
“Smooth Passes” - 1
“Glow Effects” - Off


”Mid”
“Render Scale” Set to 1.0
“Mirrored Surfaces Enable” - Off
“Realtime Reflection Probes” - Off
“Shader Quality” - High
“Soft Body Physics” - On
“MSAA Level” - 4X
“Pixel Light Count” - 2
“Smooth Passes” - 1
“Glow Effects” - Low


”High”
“Render Scale” Set to 1.0
“Mirrored Surfaces Enable” - On
“Realtime Reflection Probes” - On
“Shader Quality” - High
“Soft Body Physics” - On
“MSAA Level” - 4X
“Pixel Light Count” - 2
“Smooth Passes” - 2
“Glow Effects” - Low


”Ultra:
“Render Scale” Set to 1.5
“Mirrored Surfaces Enable” - On
“Realtime Reflection Probes” - On
“Shader Quality” - High
“Soft Body Physics” - On
“MSAA Level” - 2X
“Pixel Light Count” - 3
“Smooth Passes” - 3
“Glow Effects” - High


”Max”
“Render Scale” Set to 2.00
“Mirrored Surfaces Enable” - On
“Realtime Reflection Probes” - On
“Shader Quality” - High
“Soft Body Physics” - On
“MSAA Level” - 2X
“Pixel Light Count” - 4
“Smooth Passes” - 4
“Glow Effects” - High


“Render Scale” changes the VR resolution that VaM renders. For example if your VR headset renders at 1440X1600, setting Render Scale to 2.0 would render the game at 2880X3200. Changing it to .5 would halve the game resolution to 720X800. This can greatly affect performance.



“Mirrored Surfaces Enable” Toggles the global rendering of reflective surfaces On or Off.


“Realtime Reflection Probes” Effect only Custom Unity Assets that are using them. None of our built in assets use Realtime Reflection Probes.


“Shader Quality” Changes the quality of the in game Unity shaders.





“Soft Body Physics” Toggles the Person Atom’s Soft Body Physics On or Off. See Control & Physics 1 for more information.


“MSAA Level” Multisample Anti-Aliasing changes how smoothly the game renders the edges of objects.
This setting can greatly affect VaM’s framerate. 2X and 4X is fine for most things. Use 8X if you want to see fine hair and clothing details.


”Physics Rate” The rate at which physics is simulated. Physics is the most performance demanding feature in VaM 1.X. A higher physics rate can give more accurate simulation, but at a cost to performance. In general, use the Auto rate as it will match the rate to your system as best possible. For VR, it tries to match the physics rate to your headset refresh rate or ½ if using a high refresh rate. For Desktop, Auto uses 72hz which is the best middle point between physics accuracy and performance.

“Pixel Light Count” Limits the amount of lights that are shading each pixel of the object being rendered. This setting does not override the “Render Mode” setting on individual lights. It only works when “Render Mode” on Lights is set to “Auto” or “Force Pixel” specifically. Setting this to “3” should cover most scenes unless more pixel lights are being used. In scenes with complex lighting dropping this lower can increase FPS.


”Physics Update Cap” This is the number of physics updates that are allowed to happen per rendered frame. This is put in is to increase performance and overall FPS. If your computer cannot keep the rendered FPS above the physics rate, then this setting can prevent multiple physics updates from happening for each rendered frame.
Examples:

1. Physics Update Cap set to 1. Physics Rate 80hz. FPS is able to stay above 80FPS. In this case physics will run correctly and not go into slow-motion.
2. Physics Update Cap set to 1. Physics Rate 80hz. FPS is 40FPS. In this case physics will run in slow motion as only 1 physics updated is allowed per rendered frame. In this case the game appears to run in slow motion at about ½ speed (80/40).
3. Physics Update Cap set to 2. Physics Rate 80hz. FPS is 40FPS. In this case physics will run correctly without slow mo because 2 physics updates can happen per rendered frame. While this is ideal, the problem is each physics update takes a lot of compute power and can further lower your overall FPS. You might get a higher FPS (say 60FPS) with physics update cap set to 1, but you would experience slow mo which might not be desired.

“Smooth Passes” At runtime VaM runs a Laplacian smoothing algorithm on the mesh after it has been run through the skinning system. Lower settings can have an effect on FPS. Higher settings can soften fine detailing in custom morph vertex positions. Usually keep this between 2-3. Set it lower if you want sharper features on your Morphed models or higher if you want softer features.


"High Quality Physics" If set, it sets the physics solver to run 5x more times than if not set. Physics engines like this run the constraint solver through many iterations to improve accuracy of collisions and joint drive and constraints. Running more iterations of the solver can lead to higher collision accuracy and prevent common issues like joint wiggle. At a "Physics Rate" of 60hz, for example, the solver is set to do 30 iterations with this option off, and 150 with it on. Setting this option on will cause a slight hit to performance. This option can help most when setting "Physics Rate" to lower settings like 45hz or 60hz.


“Glow Effects” Affects the glow that is on VaM’s lighting atoms and specific props. The difference between “Low” and “High” effects are only visible in VR. In desktop mode it is an on/off Toggle.



”Desktop Vsync” This prevents Desktop FPS from exceeding the refresh rate of your monitor. VaM also has a 300FPS overall FPS cap to prevent cooking of GPUs.


”Performance Monitor” Toggling this on adds a small information window to the upper left corner of your desktop screen or within your field of view while in VR.


The Performance Monitor displays the number of milliseconds (ms) that each part of the engine requires for each frame. 10ms total time equates to 100FPS (1/0.01). 5ms total time equates to 200FPS (1/0.005).

The performance monitor can be used to show what is taking the most time to run. In most cases this will be Physics, and adjusting physics preferences like soft-body will show a large impact on the ms for the Physics entry.
The left hand column shows feedback in real time while the rIght hand column shows averages over time.
Clicking the ”Reset Averages” button will reset the right hand column.

As of the 1.21 update Memory Used (Mem Used) and Virtual Memory (VirtM Used) used are now added to the display. Please see “Performance 2” tab for more information.
”Optimize Memory” Purges all dynamically loaded items like clothing and hair releasing them from memory, so they will have to be reloaded again if they are used later.


“Process Priority” is used by the Windows process scheduling system to determine which processes get more CPU cycles.






Caching is used to speed up your load times between scene loads.
When a texture is first loaded it will be kept in the specified Cache location on your hard drive then quickly loaded when called by vam again.
The Cache is cleared when VaM is closed down or can be cleared manually using the “Clear Cache” Button.
By default Caching is toggled on, you can toggle it off here:


By default the Cache location is located in your VaM/Cache folder. You can change this by hitting the “Change Location” button and pointing to a new location.



”Reset All Settings to Default” Resets all settings in the User Preferences tab to default.
This is a global reset, not just for this specific tab. Clicking this returns you to the “First Time User Startup Page”

Fan Resources
Improving FPS in VaM
https://hub.virtamate.com/resources/improving-fps-in-vam.445/

GiveMeFPS
https://hub.virtamate.com/resources/givemefps.1367/

PSA: Physics Rate and Update Cap settings for physics heavy scenes