Strange FPS issue

[Redlite]

When I run the game as normal my FPS hovers around 33 FPS. I am using FRAPS to monitor FPS.
While playing EQ if I run Discord and bring the window to front the FPS in EQ briefly jumps towards 60 and then settles back down to ~33. If I am being active in Discord, for example scrolling through a chatroom, the FPS in EQ again jumps towards 60. If I join a voice chat channel in Discord then the FPS goes to being consistently 60 in EQ even if I minimize the Discord window.

The same effect is observed if I turn on FRAPS video recording, the FPS jumps to 60. Which is kind of strange as recording should in theory degrade performance.

My video card is reasonably beefy for this game: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M w/2GB

I am using WinEQ with CPU Affinity turned off and EQPlayNice turned off.
The power saving options for the CPU and GPU are set to max performance.

Any thoughts on what the underlying issues might be? Obviously the easy "fix" is to just be in Discord voice all the time, but I'd like to know what's actually going on.

Thank you for any feedback!

[Xollywood]

I have the same card, and my FPS seems to max out at 60 fps. A few years ago, I could get it over 100 fps, but since returning to the game 60 seems to be all I can get. I haven't made any hardware changes so I am guessing this is something that has changed on P99 somehow. I also use WinEQ but I had the CPU setting turned on. I will try it off and see if that makes any difference in frame rate.

You could also try running the game w/o WinEQ. As a work around I will right click, select the nVidia card to make sure that's the card the game is using. I have had problems with the game trying to use the onboard card.

[mcoy]

The client is locked at 60 FPS max now to stop people from using the FPS slider to avoid falling damage or gain height while levitating.

-Mcoy

[Redlite]

My FPS is worse without WinEQ, but my issue isn't that the FPS is capped at 60. It is known that the P99 client caps it at 60.

My problem is that FPS hovers around 33 unless I do one of the things that I described.

[mcoy]

Sorry, I should have quoted Xollywood as I was responding to their comment about not being able to get above 60 fps.

As for your issue - I see many people running these 3rd party programs in order to get p99 to work. I'm on my 4th or 5th system now (I just copy the folder between systems) and I've never found a need to use any of these workarounds. I just run the launch titanium.bat file and I have eqgame.exe's compatibility mode set to xp sp2 and to run in admin mode. I don't have a local firewall and I have excluded my c:\games\everquest folder from AV scanning. I'm on the latest version of Win10 and none of my other systems running Win10, 7, or XP (back a few years) have ever had issues running EQ. My ISP has been Verizon for the duration of my playing on P99 and I've never had any of the routing issues that seem to plague some people. Maybe I've just been lucky?

-Mcoy