Welcome, fellow Avigens,

I didn't think I would need to write this post, but VRC being VRC yet again, here we are. They've just release their update that adds VRAM to the performance ranking system. The good news is that it's a great way to improve performance for users with lower end GPUs, as they can limit how avatars with disastrous VRAM usage show. Nice! The bad news is that, well, the Avigen has a disastrous VRAM usage.

This new update unsurprisingly affected the Avigen pretty bad due to all of its textures. Unfortunately, the Base VRC Avigen without any modification will now officially be a Very Poor avatar, both on PC and Quest. The PC version barely goes over the 150MB limit for Poor by around 6MB, and Quest is definitely out of the question. Yikes.

I have all the reasons to be frustrated by this (especially after their very controversial EAC update less than a year ago), but I do believe it is still a great update for their game. What makes me mad is the timing, as I managed to bring the Quest version from Very Poor to Poor after months of work, made loads of visual compromises for it with Compatibility Mode (which includes those compromises for other platforms that don't need all of them, such as VRM), released this update very proudly 2 months ago only for the rank to be forced back to Very Poor by a VRC update extremely soon after.... and forever at this point without any way to bring it to poor while keeping all features. If they'd have done this from the start of VRC or at least way sooner, I wouldn't be this mad, but... ugh. Now it is done and decisions have to be made.

UPDATE: After a quick reexamination, it seems my worries for the Quest version were over-exaggerated. I went in game on Quest and triple checked the rating and it seems like it is at a Poor rating still. This effort has not been lost in the end. Whew! Still salty that they didn't add this performance rating metric sooner, but very relieved that my efforts to optimize the Quest version weren't in vain.

But, not all is lost. You still have a way to bring the ranking down yourself on PC, both one notch as an easy way and potentially a second notch with a more visual impacting way. Here are the methods:

Method 1: Change texture compression quality

The easy way is to set all textures to Normal Quality compression and the screens to High Quality compression. Doing this barely manages to go under Very Poor, down to Poor. At least, with the default Cyber Blue recolor (haven't tested the other ones). This is super easy for anyone to do, simply go to your textures in the Project folder (both your recolor and the shared textures) and change through the inspector their Compression Quality to Normal. The screen textures (eyes, beak, visor and rest) should be set to High instead (as Normal brings a lot of unwanted artifacts). This does slightly impact the visuals of the light gradients, but not too much in my opinion (you could keep those at high quality, but you might go over the 150MB limit). If you remove the occlusion texture and bake it into the color texture (just like in the Compatibility Mode textures) AND remove the usually unused color texture from the FeathersAndLights material, then you can easily go back to at least Poor.

Method 2: Change the max resolution of body textures to 2048

This, will unfortunately affect greatly the visuals of the Avigen, but will almost guarantee a come back to a Medium ranking. This require to go to the same texture panel on each of the "MDB_Avigen_Tex_Main_XXX" (color, metsmo, occlusion and normal maps) textures and changing the Max Size fields to 2048. You do not need to change the Compression Quality this time. This is exactly what has been done for the demo version of the Avigen and that one is surprisingly (and fortunately) just 0.9MB under the Medium limit. Only the Main Body textures have been changed, but you could potentially improve this further by combining the Compression Quality mode changes method on some textures too!

As the Avigen was Medium without the VRAM update, trying to improve the textures to be Good or Excellent is not useful in this case.

Conclusion: We <3 compromises

This is a very frustrating thing, as now I do not feel like promoting the performance ranking in the features list is worth it. But it is still technically possible to bring your VRC Avigens back down to their original rankings by compromising on quality. I hate compromises, but this is the situation. Sorry to everyone that was expecting an avatar that wouldn't be hidden much on low end hardware, but because VRC is VRC, this has unfortunately changed. Other platforms, such as CVR, are unaffected by a performance ranking change.

I am currently working on new avatars though, and these new ones I'll definitely be looking into optimizing the textures for each platform. Now that I know about these new limitations for VRC (if I even decide to continue with VRC), I can force myself to learn proper texture optimization (I did have some knowledge before of course). For local games such as Beat Saber, this won't matter, but online platforms will greatly benefit this.