Im using 20.5.410 and wondering if anyone else has found that if you tear off a second viewport to work on your animation, that the viewport fps is reduced exactly by half? one of the selling points from my head of 3d was the speed gains in switching to houdini, but this is kinda a big hit to that. Hoping theres a rememdy in next release.

Unless of course, i am the only one experiencing this?

We've made some improvements to this for the next major release but will continue to look at this. If you're running the VK viewport, then it will be much faster if you use enable the APEX Character Deformation display option (hit d with mouse on the second viewport, go to Optimization > APEX Character Deformation). Then you can see the evaluation without needing to use APEX Scene Invoke nor go into the Animate state.

thankyou!