Sending a toolbar panel to a new window causes a significant hit on the simulator’s framerate. Even a simple panel that shows only a few lines of text can drop the FPS by a whopping 20-25%.
No panel open showing a stable 60 fps:
Opening the ATC panel and the sim holds stable at 60 fps:
Undocking the ATC panel to a new window, however, causes the FPS to drop into the 40s:
Undocking more windows causes further degradation of the FPS, even if they’re simple text displays (windows moved off screen):
This issue has been reported elsewhere, usually in regards to breaking out an instrument from the panel, or the VFR map, but it seems there’s a more fundamental issue with the UI here and its lack of optimization so I’m bringing it up again. The undocked windows appear to be bogging down the main render loop unnecessarily, perhaps because the GPU is constantly and needlessly redrawing them along with the overhead of switching between the windows. Unlike other dynamic displays like instruments and moving maps, there’s not a good reason for this performance hit as these panels display just static text that’s sitting in an idle window for the most part.
Undocking would otherwise be a useful feature as I’d love to have these windows up on a second monitor instead of having to constantly open and close them, cluttering my main display while I’m flying. But it’s not worth the performance hit.
The game shows almost no hit on performance if the panels are contained within the main window, even if you clutter the whole screen with them, which is what I would expect when they’re undocked as well:
AMD 5900x, RTX 3090, and 64 GB of RAM