We've known about this for a while and I've posted about it in the past in our forum - what you're seeing there is FS calculating the mouse clickspots, which for some reason takes up a ridiculous amount of CPU compared to virtually any other game engine I've ever seen. You can see it really easily in windowed mode - just pull up the FPS counter (or FRAPS etc) and then click the Windows taskbar, which pulls FS away from being the active window. This apparently stops the calculations for the mouse clickspots and you'll see the FPS spike way up. As soon as you click in the FS window, it regains focus and you take a big FPS hit again. At one point during the J41's development we had this process doing completely ridiculous things, like spiking to 100+ FPS when the window wasn't focused. We're convinced mouse clickspots are the primary cause of low performance, not geometry, textures or anything else that's commonly cited.

Finally, an accurate guesstimation of what may be going horribly wrong on MS's part.... *sigh*Yep, I too play other games and do not notice this problem. So when you say clickspot, does that mean a spot that you click to bring up a popup window? Or is it anytime you click a switch or knob in the VC? Because if it was only the first thing you'd think there'd be a way to get rid of the spots, and just use shift+1, 2, 3 etc to bring up windows, without sacrificing FPS.

RyanB and Ryan MI agree with both of you, I am convinced that the mouse clicks do slow down FSX, but I thought that it could also be a USB problem! I used a serial mouse and didn't get the same sort of hit. I also tried a separate powered USB hub solely for the mouse and again the "hit" was much lower. But then, it could just be coincidence. It's a great pity that we can't disable the mouse in FSX and program its movements entirely with a 3rd party program something like FSUIPC4.Just a thoughtRegardsPeterH