AVS isn't slow at all!

[Zevensoft]

It appears the main bottleneck in AVS's performance is actually the windows drawing routines! You can test this for yourself, place a window over the AVS window, so it's no longer updating the screen (but still getting processed). You'll get a FPS increase.

Blank Preset: AVS Window visible ~145fps (peak 160fps) @ 320x240
Blank Preset: AVS Window hidden ~480fps (peak 500fps) @ 320x240

Yes, this is a bad example, so I'll do another:

ZAP4 - Into the night: AVS Window visible ~18fps (peak 19fps) @ 320x240
ZAP4 - Into the night: AVS Window hidden ~20fps (peak 21fps) @ 320x240

ZAP3 - Fireworks: AVS Window visible ~34fps (peak 19fps) @ 320x240
ZAP3 - Fireworks: AVS Window hidden ~40fps (peak 40fps) @ 320x240

Still not convinced?

J6 - Glass Cube (weeee remix): AVS Window visible ~60fps (peak 61fps) @ 320x240
J6 - Glass Cube (weeee remix): AVS Window hidden ~85fps (peak 88fps) @ 320x240

This means that perhaps AVS needs to use a better screen display method than what it currently uses. Most of these show the average draw time of 4ms, is this a bit slow in todays hardware accelerated era?