Is Character Animator CPU or GPU intensive?

[Jesse22648277f4qx]

So I have a very large and very complicated puppet that runs very slowly when I try to game at the same time. Runs beautifully by itself with my 5950x and 3080. When Gaming and running CH my GPU utilization sits around 80 percent and CPU sits around 30 percent. So where do I need the headroom? Is CH CPU or GPU intensive. I need to build a second PC to handle CH and OBS exclusivly as a streaming set up. I really need to know if a nice CPU or GPU should be my priority for CH.

[Jim Acquavella · Accepted solution]

Character Animator uses both the CPU and GPU.  If you are using Character Animator to display a smaller puppet over your game, try decreasing the Scene size to reduce the GPU requirements for rendering.  Also, ensure you are running the latest, 23.1.  

[Unstable Focus]

From my incredibly limited experience, i've found that CPU is more important, at least for rigging and interacting with things. I'm a beginner but I spent a while creating fairly complex artwork for 2 characters and trying to rig them on my old PC (i7 3770k 24gb ram Geforce GTX 1080) was an absolute nightmare, clicking to add a handle or pin took about 3-4 seconds to show, then the same to tag it as shoulder or whatever. GPU use through any of this in the program was about 3%.

I've just built a new PC - i9 13900k but am using the onboard UHD 770 graphics. Rigging stuff up is sooooo much faster now so i'd probably prioritise CPU over GPU if it's just for CA. It should be re-iterated though that i've only gotten to the rigging stage rather than anything extensive so take that as it is I guess.

[jacquave]

We are now using DX12 on windows with the newest build.  If you feel Character Animator is using too much CPU/GPU, in addition to reducing the Scene size to match your final pixel size in screen space, try reducing the frame rate.  

[Aaron224705004x32]

How is this marked solved?  I have the issue where as soon as I start my game, the fps drops below 10 and my character seriously lags.  My pc can handle games and VR games.  The whole point was to be able to livestream using my character.  I have reduced the size of my puppet and it is really basic.  Just blinks, eyes move, and mouth moves.  No triggers... not even a full body.  I really need help with this.

[jacquave]

It's hard to know what is causing this issue without having the same machine, game and streaming service.  Can you try using Character Animator alone, in a 60 frame-per-second scene and let me know the frame rate that appears at the bottom of the scene panel.  If we aren't able to keep up, this will show an "actual" frame rate:

[Aaron224705004x32]

So, it looks like I will need to get a second pc to have dual pc streaming for Character Animator and my steam games to work well for a stream.  I planned on it anyways.  Character Animator takes up a lot of my pc resources.  Apparently and luckily I'm not the only one.  So... for now I will just record as usual, then just use After Effects to track my face movements.  For non streaming of course.