Low FPS, Vista boost doesnt help

[dbeachy1]

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.

 

[Andy44]

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.

 

[Hielor]

Very odd. Try increasing the Orbiter process's thread priority through the task manager, maybe?

 

[Andy44]

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.

 

[Hielor]

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?

 

[Andy44]

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.

 

[Hielor]

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.