When it comes to cloth physics, I would like to see the performance characteristics of them re-analyzed. The current cloth physics limits were put in place back when VRChat was based on Unity 2017, which had major bugs impacting the performance of cloth physics items. This led to incredibly low vertex count limits for cloth physics items, which is why so few avatars use the feature. The hard-limit for cloth physics vertices should be determined based both this performance re-analysis, as well as the current usage of cloth physics on avatars
This is already discussed in a few canny posts, but I just want to try and bring more visibility to the issue, since it’s now being discussed
Just as a bit of anecdotal information, I have an avatar that is currently rated as “very poor performance” solely due to the total cloth vertex count. Out of curiosity, I went to play mode and enabled the profiler, and spawned in 128 copies of the avatar. Cloth calculations made up less than 2 ms of my CPU time, while physbones (rated medium impact on this avatar) were using 14-16 ms of CPU time. As for load hitching, there was no perceivable difference in the time it took to to make 64 duplicates of the avatar with the cloth component deleted. If anything was going to get this avatar marked as very poor performance, it would be the physbones or skinned mesh renderers with the most impact on that rating, yet its the 2 ms of cloth calculations that result in that rating