i'm not a fan of GiveMeFPS either.You can also set the hair pieces in the "Look" tab to "fast".
I cannot recommend Givemefps because it resets all hair assets physics to 16 which will look really bad if you use pubic or other hair assets like brows.
Use OpenVR with FSR2 and lower hair pieces quality to a minimum and or to personal liking. Reducing hair lenght also boosts fps.
If you use a single dim light (from bodylanguage's watchme plugin for example) and toggle off all other light resource (within watchme with one click), you will not really see a difference in hair quality but your fps should be significantly better than before.
Mine jumped from 15-20ish on heavy scenes to 30 and higher with a 1080ti.
i already made my own minimum viable light subscene with 2 directional pixel lights.
i thought the hair shader made a huge visual difference, but i guess the lack of shadows is okay if you don't do an A-B comparison all the time.
i don't know how i didn't find this sooner, my 3070 runs at 45 fps (no spaceswap lock) with hair and being close to the character, and 120 fps with no hair at any distance, with all plugins turned off. i have no idea how this is acceptable, i would be pretty mad if i paid for VAM.
...i just found out it's not even the physics that are so taxing, it's just the hair renderer. turning hair sim on and off makes almost no difference.