Noticed this while doing some testing between Shader 3.0 vs. not having it installed for Nvidia users.

This test is the NGX, 100% UT2 traffic, Fair weather theme, and Orbx PNW. Sitting on the runway with downtown Seattle and the terminal in view seems to be about the worst FPS situation you can put FSX in (minus some situation you setup that would never happen in the sim during a normal flight).
 

What I noticed was that with the mouse over the menu bar there's a 5 FPS increase. And it holds steady as long as the mouse is there. Anyone have any idea what is causing this?

If I had to guess I'd bet this is some quirk with my system and combination of addons, otherwise someone else would of noticed this before.

Here's screenshot proof. The second screenshot is with the mouse over the menu bar but FSX's internal SS utility doesn't show the mouse for some reason. But I promise, that second shot was with my mouse over the menu bar.
 

It happens if your mouse pointer is not visible either. You can also move the mouse pointer to a 2d panel, that should give you the FPS buff as well. This phenomenon pretty common with most FSX addons

Putting the cursor over the menu bar is the same thing as waiting a few seconds for it to hide when it's in the normal part of the window.

 

Here's a quick explanation of why the performance hit happens:

 

Most 3D games that use mouse cursors actually have the pointer in the game "world" as a 3D object. This carries no performance hit with it because it's there in the 3D engine already just like any other object. FSX does not do this - when you bring the mouse onto the screen in FSX, it's a 2D Windows object overlaid onto the sim's 3D scene. The sim has to perform some very CPU intensive math in order to figure out where in 3D space the mouse pointer is referencing. We complained about it to MS as far back as the development of the 400X. They were going to fix it and add a 3D cursor that's part of the world in SP3 but the studio was shut down before they could do it. On a lot of other aircraft it's an even worse hit than 5FPS, we did a lot to try to mitigate the effects of it. It gets worse the higher the number of clickspot areas the sim has to keep track of.

Makes total sense. Thanks.

You're complaining with 22.4 FPS?

 

I envy your 22.4.

 

This is however good to know. Does being windowed mode alter this behavior in any way?

Windowed or fullscreen has no effect AFAIK. You still get the framedrops, windowed or not

Windowed or fullscreen has no effect AFAIK. You still get the framedrops, windowed or not

 

Yea I actually checked it out just now. I never fly with an FPS counter usually, though the last day or so I've been having major issues from new stuff I threw into my mixture. I noted after reading this that leaving the mouse cursor on the top of the window, the bit where the X and the - are, had the effect of increasing my frames between 3-5 more.

Windowed or fullscreen has no effect AFAIK. You still get the framedrops, windowed or not

I've heard/read different things about that here, adn from my own experience it does make a different. I get a slightly better performance in windowed mode than in full screen, but that's probably an average of only 2 FPS. Could be that this effect is system-specific, though...

I use Input Director, and place my mouse cursor on the screen of my networked laptop, have a Samsung LCD attached to it So it is never left stationary on my fsx screen. Works great.