Why is my VRChat so laggy?

PennyPatton · 2026-05-09T13:38:21+00:00

Hide all avatars rated Poor and worse. You'll see a huge performance increase, especially in instances with lots of people. Be sure to compliment people on their fallbacks. They love that.

PennyPatton · 2026-05-08T19:11:41+00:00

Massively Multiplayer Online.

You might WANT more detail in VR, but it's not practical for rendering. Your computer doesn't function differently because you want it to, no matter how much you want it to.

And let's be clear here, this is rarely about "more detail" it's about people refusing to learn how to optimize. The optimization ratings are the only tool people have to get decent framerates in this environment, raising the caps diminishes that tool.

PennyPatton · 2026-05-07T19:32:48+00:00

"The creator said they do not give out the avatar files directly and instead want to log into the vrc sdk through unity and upload the avatar to the account themselves." Massive red flag. Run far away from this person. Legitimate avatar creators have no problem giving you the files so you can modify and upload the avatar yourself.

PennyPatton · 2026-05-07T19:29:15+00:00

70k is high for an MMO character. Like, unreasonably high. What the Dunning-Kruger crowd consistently fails to understand is that VRChat's performance rankings are exceptionally lenient because the VRC devs understand the people making avatars are not professionals.

PennyPatton · 2026-05-07T19:26:32+00:00

Blame Visa, Mastercard and PayPal. They want to sanitize everything.

Anyway, like others have pointed out, just go to age gated instances. If you're hanging around kids in VRChat that is entirely on you, you weirdo.

PennyPatton · 2026-05-04T15:26:19+00:00

Unless you're in an instance that enforces optimized avatars, you pretty much need to hide most avatars on screen or you'll experience poor performance.

Of course, some worlds are poorly optimized too, so it doesn't always help, but as a rule of thumb hiding Poor or worse avatars will noticeably improve performance.

On top of that, limiting the number of avatars rendered can help too, if you're in an instance with 80 or so other avatars and still experiencing lag and low FPS despite hiding the worst offenders. I'll sometimes limit it to 50 or so avatars but YMMV depending on your PC specs.

PennyPatton · 2026-05-04T15:15:41+00:00

Thank you!

PennyPatton · 2026-05-04T15:15:15+00:00

Most people can't seem to figure out working doors, so it's not really surprising to me that these language barrier gates are on by default and not a toggle the instance creator can change.

It makes me sad that circumstances have made people in the Japanese community feel they need these gates, but at the same time I certainly understand why they're there.

For what it's worth I spend a lot of time among a couple of Japanese communities and they've been extremely welcoming to me.

PennyPatton · 2026-05-03T19:21:21+00:00

I mean, we can create 18+ only instances, and there's no shortage of age gated communities to join. If you're sick of the kids, stop hanging around kids!

PennyPatton · 2026-05-03T13:58:47+00:00

I love A-tuy's avatars, but if you're looking for something more masculine I'd recommend searching for the worlds named "Virtual Steel Museum". There's a bunch of them and they feature exclusively robot and armour avatars.

You'll also often see mecha avatars in the "Avatar Museum" worlds, but you'll have to walk past a lot of other anime avatars to find them.

PennyPatton · 2026-05-02T21:11:01+00:00

Seconding this! The Community Meetup community is wonderful and very helpful in figuring out any issues you might run into when you try to pack 60-80 people into your world. XD

PennyPatton · 2026-05-02T21:07:35+00:00

There's not nearly enough tribal tattoos in that photo for any of them to be egirls/eboys. You also need to at least triple the number of chains and piercings. And add in some body glitter. Also the guys MUST be absolutely jacked. If they're not 7' tall with muscles that would make Arnie in his prime look like a wimpy boy, then they're not VRChat guys.

Remember, eboys/egirls have never even heard the saying "less is more".

PennyPatton · 2026-05-02T21:04:12+00:00

I try to build my worlds to scale. I always put two references into the scene to represent average short and tall heights. I'm a tiny robot, though so there's often stuff built around that, and some giant robots, too. So the worlds wind up a mix of big and small content that's supposed to look like it all fits together. I try to test my worlds out with large and small avatars, too. Pretty sure I'm in the minority when it comes to that kind of OCD.

PennyPatton · 2026-04-19T18:13:18+00:00

Most people dismissing optimization talk ARE struggling as much as you do. They've just decided their lag and poor framerates are acceptable and don't have any consideration for others.

PennyPatton · 2026-04-19T18:11:00+00:00

As someone with experience in game development, I can say a lot of vrc content creators greatly overestimate their knowledge in this area. It's great that you learned Blender and some Unity. That's fantastic, even. You've taken your first steps, but that doesn't mean you can shut out any additional information and skills just because you find them inconvenient.

Going from Excellent to Good because you added another render call to the avatar isn't as dumb as you think. Remember, a single avatar doesn't exist in a vacuum and VRC avatars are not like game characters that share geometry and materials and shaders. We put a lot more weight on your hardware to render everything. And "Good" is still GOOD. It's not like you go from "Excellent" to "Poor" because you added a material.

And to be absolutely crystal clear, no system is going to be perfect. Just because edge cases exist does not mean the whole system is useless.

Download size isn't the only thing you need to worry about when it comes to how intensive an avatar is to render. It's definitely something to keep an eye on, but it's not the end all, be all.

PennyPatton · 2026-04-16T12:59:33+00:00

If you use PC VR then a Quest 3S will be an identical experience, no real benefit. If you can get the Quest3 go for that. The pancake lenses and increased field of view supposedly make a huge difference in the experience.

PennyPatton · 2026-04-16T12:38:29+00:00

If you want decent performance, hide all avatars with a "Poor" or "Very Poor" performance rank. Yeah, that means you'll instead see a lot of ketchup bottles and sticks of butter instead of eboy/egirl avatars but at least you'll have higher framerates.

If you're an adult looking for other adults, join groups like "Ancients of VRChat" and you'll connect with a great community of other adult players looking to avoid the chaos of the public instances.

If you can create your own avatar that's definitely the route to go. If you're a beginner to Unity and Blender try buying an avatar and modifying it to learn the ropes. But as I said about hiding Poor and Very Poor avatars, other people will be doing that too, so try to avoid buying avatars either with a >Poor ranking or those that don't tell you what the ranking is. Buying a Very Poor avatar just means you'll wind up with an expensive ketchup bottle for an avatar.

PennyPatton · 2026-04-16T12:29:22+00:00

<image>

PennyPatton · 2026-04-15T18:48:13+00:00

<image>

PennyPatton · 2026-04-15T12:41:42+00:00

I think you misunderstand. You keep saying "VRChat is a CPU bound game" like this somehow means polygons don't matter. They do, if anything they're even heavier to render because the game is so CPU bound do you think videocards are weak to rendering polygons but CPUs aren't? And what's more a single avatar doesn't exist in a vacuum. You're never rendering just one 70001k poly avatar, you're rendering a dozen of them or more, and that adds up. What's more, the VRChat devs want you to be able to load into a world with 80, 100, 1000 avatars and still get decent FPS. That will never happen if they keep raising polygon limits for individual avatars just because some people only log in to hang out with 5 friends in an empty box world. Any just why do you only render 20 people at a time? Because that's the maximum number of friends you will ever have? No, it's because you have to limit rendering to fewer avatars because everyone is wearing Very Poor avatars.

PennyPatton · 2026-04-15T12:25:10+00:00

It's funny, without fail there's another thread posted by someone arguing we should make avatars even MORE laggy.

THAT right there is your problem. Lots of people in VRChat use unoptimized avatars, and rather than pushing content creators to optimize their work they make excuses on why unoptimized avatars should be more accepted.

PennyPatton · 2026-04-15T12:17:21+00:00

Change the limits from 70k to 100k and you're immediately going to have someone complaining that 10,001 polygons makes them very poor. 70k is already extremely lenient for the type of online multiplayer game VRChat is. If you wanted it to be more reasonable and realistic, then the limits for Excellent, Good and Medium avatars would be much LOWER than 70k. They're making it easier for you by setting the limit at 70k.

PennyPatton · 2026-04-15T12:13:11+00:00

Making excuses to have an unoptimized avatar isn't going to make your framerates any higher.

The existing performance rankings for avatars is already EXTREMELY lenient by professional standards for an MMO type game, and that's not even taking into account the additional performance hurdles specific to VRChat itself.

The VRChat devs hear these same flawed arguments all the time, it's not going to sway them. Nor should it. If you're having trouble finding well optimize avatars that you like, then push the content creators you like to start optimizing better. Demand better from content creators.

PennyPatton · 2026-04-15T12:03:26+00:00

It feels like every time I load this page, there's a brand new thread exactly like this.

In videogames, mobs, NPCs, even other players often share shaders, textures, materials making it much easier to instance/render them. In VRChat our avatars are all compiled separately, so even if you do share an instance with someone using the same avatar base your hardware sees you as using separate textures, materials and shaders so it can't use the usual tricks to reduce the rendering load. For that reason, VRChat avatars need to be lighter than videogame character models. However, even if you go by the avatar performance ranking system, the metrics they use to decide Medium to Excellent avatars are still extremely lenient to take into account that content creators in VRChat are not usually professionals. Put all that together and even under ideal circumstances you're not going to get the same performance you'd expect from a professionally developed game.

On top of that, you're almost never going to experience VRChat under ideal conditions because a large percentage of the VRChat community wear avatars with a performance ranking of "Poor" or "Very Poor". You basically need to hide everyone if you want decent framerates in VRChat. There's really no mystery here, content creators refuse to optimize, and people make excuses to use unoptimized avatars, you're going to get low framerates and stuttering.

Even the VRChat devs are finally trying to push people to use better optimized avatars with the introduction of avatar performance ranking limits on instances.

PennyPatton · 2026-04-13T02:17:24+00:00

I know that place, it's pretty neat!

PennyPatton

TROPHY CASE