P3D v4.3 strange behaviour (but maybe easy to fix?)

[Alberto Zanot 53]

Hello everybody!

i've  noticed that if i overlay a window, any window, over P3D it runs 10 fps faster.

No matter if i set P3D fullscreen or not (actually it is borderless windowed, not true fullscreen), if there is another app window over it, it runs 10 fps faster.

How possible? I assume that my pc can go those 10 fps more, but how?!

Thanks for any help!

Edited September 25, 2018 by Alberto Zanot

[Chock 17,769]

24 minutes ago, Alberto Zanot said:

Hello everybody!

i've  noticed that if i overlay a window, any window, over P3D it runs 10 fps faster.

No matter if i set P3D fullscreen or not (actually it is borderless windowed, not true fullscreen), if there is another app window over it, it runs 10 fps faster.

How possible? I assume that my pc can go those 10 fps more, but how?!

It's kind of obvious when you think about it; the screen area of your flight sim which your overlaid window is obscuring, would of course normally be displaying your flight sim, but since your monitor is no longer displaying your flight sim in that area of the screen, your GPU and CPU don't have to do as much work to update the display for that part of the screen. The part of the flight sim which is 'behind' the overlaid window is not really 'behind' it at all, it quite simply is not being drawn by the computer for display by the monitor, because it doesn't need to be so long as that window is in its place.

Since the hardware of your computer doesn't have to do as much work when something like this occurs, those hardware parts also don't have to transfer as much data about that work (or rather lack of work they are doing) between themself and other components such as the CPU, GPU and RAM. This frees up the hardware to work faster on the bits it still has to render for display. Not only that, since your hardware is calculating and rendering less stuff, there is less chance of a throughput bottleneck on any part of your system because there are considerably fewer electrons having to whizz along all those wires and circuits between the various components.

End result: Faster processing, so higher FPS.

You would see the same thing if you went into windowed mode with your flight sim and dragged the window a bit smaller, it's just less pixels for the computer to have to update.

Edited September 25, 2018 by Chock

[Alberto Zanot 53]

I'm afraid i cannot agree.

This happens even if the overlayed window is 2px per 2px... or half screen, same result. 

By your reasoning if i overlay 3/4 of the sim window it should run faster than overlayed with a 2px x 2px window.
Do not happen. Despite the area i cover, i get same result.

[pracines 823]

How about overlaying say 3 windows, does that get you and extra 30 FPS?

I'm very interested in any explanation or debunking on this topic. There has to be a logical explanation, because the impossibility or simplicity of performance enhancing by 10 FPS simply by overlaying another window over P3D (even a square pixel) is just not believable. But the mouse cursor thing discovered way back was real so I wont call this fake news yet. 

A video of this "miracle" would be welcome.  

[AnkH 2,282]

Just press P and surprise, surprise, your magical 10 FPS are there as well. Or, vice versa, deactivate the Prepar3d setting "pause on loss of focus" and you can move as many windows as you want in front of your P3D window without seeing a single FPS more.

Possible reason: it seems that pausing the sim does more than simply stopping everything, it seems that also some processes are stopped, resulting in slightly more ressources available for the rendering --> more FPS. The only thing that seems to have an effect: if you have a G-Sync monitor and the option "enable G-sync in fullscreen and windowed mode" enabled. Try once without this...

[Alberto Zanot 53]

"does that get you and extra 30 FPS?"

That was fun 🙂
It is not only about apps' windows overlaying, but also if i just hit windows-key and i open up the start menu: 9 to 11 fps more.

I will make soon a video of the MIRACLE. Actually i would call it "a personal configuration problem".

 

@Ankh i dont have gsync monitor, and p3d doesn't go pause on loss focus.

Edited September 25, 2018 by Alberto Zanot

[AnkH 2,282]

Do you measure the FPS with the internal FPS counter? Otherwise, this counter might simply be bugged and telling you the FPS of the window overlaying P3D. There was such a video on YT recently, called "magical fix", but in the end it was just the FPS counter that counted the P3D fps when the P3D window was active and the FPS of the other window when this was active. Of course, the FPS of the other window were drastically higher...

Edited September 25, 2018 by AnkH

[Rocky_53 1,594]

3 hours ago, Chock said:

It's kind of obvious when you think about it; the screen area of your flight sim which your overlaid window is obscuring, would of course normally be displaying your flight sim, but since your monitor is no longer displaying your flight sim in that area of the screen, your GPU and CPU don't have to do as much work to update the display for that part of the screen. The part of the flight sim which is 'behind' the overlaid window is not really 'behind' it at all, it quite simply is not being drawn by the computer for display by the monitor, because it doesn't need to be so long as that window is in its place.

Since the hardware of your computer doesn't have to do as much work when something like this occurs, those hardware parts also don't have to transfer as much data about that work (or rather lack of work they are doing) between themself and other components such as the CPU, GPU and RAM. This frees up the hardware to work faster on the bits it still has to render for display. Not only that, since your hardware is calculating and rendering less stuff, there is less chance of a throughput bottleneck on any part of your system because there are considerably fewer electrons having to whizz along all those wires and circuits between the various components.

End result: Faster processing, so higher FPS.

You would see the same thing if you went into windowed mode with your flight sim and dragged the window a bit smaller, it's just less pixels for the computer to have to update.

Nah Alan, sorry, nice in theory but I disagree. I really don't think 10fps could be had by dragging a small window over the main screen. Maybe a frame or less, but not 10fps 😉 I suspect something else is at play.

Edited September 25, 2018 by Rockliffe