Dual Instance Performance Frelled

Howdy.

At some point, I was able to fire up two instances of CoH on my current rig without an issue, without lowering graphics settings, without even having to use windowed mode.

Two full screen instances that I'd alt-tab between without more than a moment or two of FPS drag.

Yes, I was using the /maxinactivefps 5 flag.

Now, however, things will be fine for a while, then drop to 10-20FPS on the active instance, then back to normal, and so on. It's random, it's erratic, and it's buggin me.

System is Win 7 64bit with 6GB RAM and a 5870 ATI card with the 10.9 drivers.

It IS possible that I have not dualboxed since before ultra mode went live and that this is just a case of "yes, Bill, you're going to have to dumb down your settings when dualboxing, freakin deal, buddy," but I don't understand why this would be the case when I can have these huge FPS disparities (going from 55FPS to 20FPS) while within a single mission map.

No this is also not a case of "well, a bunch is happening in some particular moment of combat, then FPS goes back up."

It's a case of "I'm standing still with nothing around me and I've got 15FPS but 5 minutes ago I was at 55FPS in the middle of an aggro cap of baddies."

So, what's the latest scoop on dualboxing?

EDIT: Dropped world detail to 100% from 150%. all seems fine at the moment. hmm.

EDIT2: Ran a whole mission, exited mission, FPS plummets sitting in the AE at the portal... but once I move around a bit, things wake back up.

Oh well. Nevermind. Issue seems resolved.

One thing to check is to make sure the resolution is set to Desktop. I had trouble on my system because I had it set to the same resolution as the desktop, but without the added tag. I'm not sure why there's a difference, but there clearly is. It was doing a number of odd things, including basically preventing me from using Alt-Tab to switch from one instance of the program to the second, or back again. (It would, if I hammered the button, but only randomly. I ended up having to use the Windows key to basically page to the taskbar and click the other copy, and even that didn't always work because once in a while they'd switch places in the taskbar.)

If that doesn't help, then I have no clue, unfortunately.

*Edited for spelling.*

FSAA is my usual culprit of slideshowism when dual instancing. Dropping it down a notch on one or both instance clears it right up.

I sometimes dual box, and most of the time the second account door/ contact sits Is there an easy way to have two shortcuts one for "high level graphics" and the second is bare minimum?

Not that I've found, 23X. Best I've seen is the use of the /maxinactive fps 10 command. Looks like you can add that to the end of the shortcut's target line as follows:

"c:\program files\city of heroes\cohupdater.exe" -maxinactivefps 10

Which should cause whatever instance is in the background to cap out at 10 frames per second, thus freeing up some resources.

Someone mentioned in channel last night a command that is supposed to stop all rendering to the inactive instance, but I neglected to write it down.