Low FPS, Vista boost doesnt help

If you haven't tried VistaBoost yet, give it a shot. :) Like TBL said, the reason you're taking a big framerate hit with MFDs is because of all the GDI drawing that MFDs do. VistaBoost could help with the text portion of that, at least.
 
I tried VistaBoost, but it didn't help much. Once I open an external MFD it gets bad, and if I bring up Surface MFD in the external window, it drops to single-digit FPS. I also disabled ClearType manually but same problem.
 
Very odd. Try increasing the Orbiter process's thread priority through the task manager, maybe?
 
Very odd. Try increasing the Orbiter process's thread priority through the task manager, maybe?

Just tried that, no solution.

It's very consistent. If I open SurfaceMFD in an external MFD window the FPS drops down to like 3 or 4. As soon as I close the window, the FPS jumps back into the 50s or higher.

Running Surface on an internal MFD only drops the FPS to about 22 or so.
 
Just tried that, no solution.

It's very consistent. If I open SurfaceMFD in an external MFD window the FPS drops down to like 3 or 4. As soon as I close the window, the FPS jumps back into the 50s or higher.

Running Surface on an internal MFD only drops the FPS to about 22 or so.
I had noticed the worse performance using external MFD, even on XP. I guess it's doing something differently that's exaggerated on Vista.

Are you using this with just one monitor, or more than one?
 
I had noticed the worse performance using external MFD, even on XP. I guess it's doing something differently that's exaggerated on Vista.

Are you using this with just one monitor, or more than one?

No all, one, on a laptop.
 
No all, one, on a laptop.
Do you have an external monitor you can use instead of the laptop screen? Some people have reported that this (oddly enough) improves the performance, but YMMV. For example, I have a laptop with a very similar problem (framerate will gradually slow to crawl as I play with the SurfaceMFD up) but I could run it on an LCD TV over the HDMI out at a much higher resolution without any performance hit.

You could try using the Orbiter beta with the OGLA renderer; that avoids the GDI problem entirely (but as a downside can't render MFDs that don't use the new Sketchpad interface).

Another thing you could try if you want a surface mfd in an external window would be RemoteMFD using Orb:Connect...the version of the surface MFD that we have there is pretty much complete and surpasses the built-in one in a few ways. No current plans to port it to the SketchPad interface for using directly in Orbiter, though.
 
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