Here is more food for thought...
Your avatar is being rendered in a game engine therefore your animated model is sending rays in an effort to locate itself pertaining to collision detection....
When you have a large number of verticies that look for collision this causes the frame rate to drop conciderably... (At least as I have noticed....) Also... in the new 3dgs versions it is almost manditory to surround your entire game area with a hollow cube.... that helps with that ray/ collision detection... by shorting the rays... I guess... you can make the hollow cube invisible too....
Anouther thing you can do is reduce your texture size as small as possable but maintain quality... I use .dds images they help a great deal too....
Best of luck...