UI's take away from the game's performance we all desperately need!

[gm9]

For testing purposes, I had tried to load a UI with most xml's removed. It didn't make much of a difference, there was still a noticable performance increase when hitting F10 twice. But then my system is rather now end, so differences might be seen on high end machines.

The EQ2 engine seems to have a problem with overlaying the UI over the game graphics, and this doesn't seem to depend very much on what is actually shown in the UI. For example, putting up a black background via the widescreen overlay setting doesn't change performance at all on my system (those black bars are just another UI window).

On a side note, I was recently forced so switch a number of fonts from true type fonts to bitmap fonts. I'm still trying to figure out whether this increases or decreases performance. Since the smooth fonts is a considerable performance hit, I'd expect the use of bitmap fonts to even help performance, although they might take more memory.