[Kesava]

Semlar mentioned me, so I'll pop in...

As Semlar mentioned, I've been doing the WorldFrame trick with my nameplate addon for a while but for a different purpose. I wanted to manuallly set the position of my nameplates every frame so that I could make sure they were on 1:1 pixels and overcome the UI anti-aliasing issues. I noticed as a result of doing this, and of manually setting the position rather than using something like SetAllPoints, my nameplates had practically no effect on FPS over the default nameplates. Initially it was faster, but I'm not sure if that's the case anymore as I can't :Hide() the default UI elements otherwise I'd break compatibility with other addons.

I mentioned this to the author of TidyPlates a while ago and had the conclusion that what creates the most lag is adding frames as children directly to the default nameplates. I believe he made a test version with his nameplates parented to the WorldFrame and that alone drastically reduced the impact.

Since I'm doing this to make the nameplates pixel-perfect, I obviously have to do a little maths every frame aswell but even with that it still has a positive effect on FPS.

A particularly negative effect I've noticed from doing this is that when using stacking nameplates (the default UI option), if there are too many nameplates displayed and the stacking method "gives up", nameplates will jitter around slightly. This seems to only happen when using stacking, not spreading. That may be a result of my 1:1 code however.

Edit: no such luck with some potential improvements, I'll have to look into this more during my still-in-progress complete rewrite. I have a lot of stuff to look in to.