Overlays (ship icons, target window) cut FPS in half

[user1679]

X4: 5.10 HF2
OS: Win 7
GPU: 1050 Ti (4 GB vRam)
CPU: i5 7500
Ram: 24 GB

I've been tring to troubleshoot performance issues so I removed all mods except the 3 DLC. I started MSI Afterburner and launched X4.
After creating a new game, I flew to an area where there were no other ships and a station at 71 Km away.

The strange behavior I noticed is when I have nothing selected, my FPS fluctuated between 54 and 62. As soon as I clicked the station
and the target info window appeared, my FPS went to 32 and then fluctuated between 29 and 35. When I clicked in space to clear the
target info window, my FPS went back to 62.

I also noticed that when a freighter flew by and the icon appeared over the ship in space (not map), my FPS went to 37 until it flew
far enough away that I could still see the ship but the icon was gone. At this point my FPS went to 47, then 58 after a few seconds.
Note that my LOD is set at 15 and the ship was far enough away that very little detail was rendered.

Is there any way the overlay that has the info window can be made a little less GPU intensive? I doubt this is CPU bottleneck because it is
caused only when the info window is active.

For the purposes of this "test", my game was literally 1 minute old, there was only a small planet, 1/2 a large planet in my viewport
and the station at 71 Km away. Opening the map showed no ships within my area besides the freighter that flew by.

[user1679]

Update: This might be a problem with Vulkan.

I updated my Vulkan runtimes and saw a slight improvement. My base FPS was now between 68-72 and when I brought up the target info window, it went to 38-42.
Unfortunately it isn't as simple as just installing new Vulkan runtimes.

Because nVidia drivers after 472.12 on Windows 7 are unstable, I was forced to stop there. These drivers install Vulkan 1.2.175 (according to the config file nv-vk64.json in System32)
and installing the "latest" 1.3.x Vulkan drivers afterward resulted in X4 error 212 ("no suitable graphics card"). I assume this is because the nVidia drivers that use the Vulkan 1.3.x
libraries are for Win 10/11 only so the 472.12 drivers couldn't use them.

So first I simply installed Vulkan 1.2.198.1 assuming it would update the nVidia installation but instead it nuked the Vulkan registry entries and the JSON file, and caused the same 212 error.
Fortunately I was able to just run the nVidia 472.12 driver installer and it fixed the registry entries, restored the nv-vk64.json file that went missing too, but left the newer Vulkan runtimes
without downgrading them. Interesting thing is the JSON file says: "api_version" : "1.2.175" which allows the newer runtimes to fall back to the older API.

It would seem the FPS drop from overlays is a Vulkan related issue. Updating the drivers improved FPS slightly but I wonder if there is a different method of creating the overlay
in the Vulkan API that would be less GPU intensive.