You can set bgrender to 0 and it will have no effect on performance of the character in the background. He won't lag or have macros/plugins be less responsive. Framelimiter is a huge game changer for MQ and boxing. When bgrender is set to 0 that instance of EQ will use 0% of your GPU.
Appreciate the replies. I may be wrong on this, so correct me if so, but EqWire was / is different in that:
MQ2EQWire entirely stops EverQuest's draw call, meaning the graphics won't update when running in the background, but the game will respond as normal.
It can be used in conjunction with an FPS limiter for maximum CPU reduction, or on its own for maximum performance with a slight effect on CPU reduction.
I admittedly haven't played since the big patch that forced a move to mqnext, and was just loading stuff up last night to see what was different and noticed mq2eqwire was absent.