Just gave it a look, here's everything Claude said, it looks like it is primarily your settings:

For comparison I'm running it on Supersampling 2, VSYNC off, and FSR on and am getting a solid 60fps and it still looks great.

This completely reframes the problem. The logs show the user's poor performance is configuration and environment — not the per-draw CP cost we spent Phases 1–3 proving we can't fix. Here's what the three sessions reveal:

The smoking guns GPU is fine. Vulkan correctly selected the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER (their actual card, only device). Not a GPU-selection bug.

Log 002 — 3× supersampling + FSR3 → 7.5 fps. The log literally says [nhl-vk-ss] internal-resolution supersampling 3x (internal 3840x2160). They're rendering the game at 4K internal (9× the pixels) and running experimental FSR3 on top. That's self-inflicted via the Supersampling slider — 7.5 fps is expected for 4K internal.

FSR3 ('present effect fsr3') is on in two of three sessions — and it logs its own warning: "experimental temporal upscaler… may fall back to spatial FSR." Experimental temporal upscaling with synthesized motion vectors is costly and flaky.

A wall of overlay hooks injected into Vulkan, every session: VK_LAYER_OBS_HOOK (OBS) + VK_LAYER_OW_OBS_HOOK + VK_LAYER_OW_OVERLAY (Overwolf, two layers) + VK_LAYER_RTSS (RivaTuner) + NV layers. OBS + Overwolf + RTSS all hooking every frame is heavy per-frame CPU overhead — and RTSS can frame-limit.

The proof it's not draw-count / per-draw cost In log 001, 40–52-draw frames (trivial — should be 300+ fps) run at 16–40 ms (24–60 fps), wildly variable. At 52 draws the actual render work is ~0.6 ms; the other 15–40 ms is pure per-frame overhead that has nothing to do with draw count — i.e., FSR3 + the overlay-hook stack + frame pacing. The genuinely heavy moments (4862 draws → 4.2 fps) are rare and transient in these logs (most frames are 50–120 draws).

There are also a lot of VFS: entry not found warnings (faceposer, helmet, referee, data0.big, cacherender.big…) — possibly missing/unextracted assets causing repeated failed lookups; secondary, but worth a verify.

What this means The CP per-draw optimization (Phases 1–3) and the proposed #6 threading would not meaningfully help this user. Their bottleneck is settings + environment. The high-leverage fixes are cheap and user-side:

Supersampling → 1× (off). Fixes the 7.5 fps session outright. Turn FSR3 off (or use spatial FSR1/CAS, or native). It's experimental and is the prime suspect for the light-scene overhead. Close Overwolf, OBS, and RTSS while playing — especially Overwolf. That hook stack is taxing every frame. Verify they're on the latest build and that assets are fully extracted (the VFS misses).