A friend, Lonn in the US, who emailed me with some questions regarding MSFS performance hit he encountered lately after he got his 7th Logitech FIP and my C172 CMP+Annunciator.  I think his case is worth a post to clear up some queries among those who are building their home cockpits with FIPs.

His questions here:

How many Fips do you run? I am getting a 7th and have noticed lately that my cpu usage is getting high on the Logiflightsimulator.exe or Logitech exe for the panels.

I also noticed certain gauges use more CPU intensive. Like the new Cessna 172 CMP I just bought from you seems to use alot of cpu compared to another asi gauge etc. How do you deal with it.

If I turn off the logitech panel drivers altogether I get better fps since the cpu isn’t bogged down. I know you run alot of panels and wondered how you work around this?

It seems the more complex the gauge set the more cpu that logitech exe takes up. Like the CH701 takes up nothing. But you start getting the eng on the 172 along with the hsi and the new cmp and the cpu usage is very high.

Man I am going to have to start planning my gauges around cpu usage. Any advise? Do you have this issue?

My answers:

Yes, you are right that Logitech FIPs kill some cpu power, no matter you are running them with the default driver or SPAD.neXt.

I have two systems. The one mainly for flight simulation has 12 FIPs on it. But I don’t see much drop in fps.  My computer is i9-11900K with 64G and 3080Ti card.

However, I do sometimes experience sluggish on the FIPs. They can be fixed by reloading MSFS or rebooting the system in general.

BTW, the new C172 CMP+ANPL isn’t a very complicated gauge. It shouldn’t cost too much cpu resources.

The G5 PFD and HSI are the most complicated gauges I have ever made. If you don’t see much drop from the G5 gauges, the CMP shouldn’t drag the fps much.

Also, cleaning up the gauge list with no more than 15 gauges for each aircraft definitely helps. The less (the cleaner) is the better and you can use the GaugeSwitcher to do it.

Also you can (optionally) set the MSFS priority to high by using 3rd party utilities such as the one mentioned in my Post 736.

Similarly, you can use the utility to set the Logitech driver to Low. That helps too without affecting both FIP and MSFS performance.

Lonn reported back a few days later:

I reworked many of My profiles on the GaugeSwitcher and cleaned things up a bit.

Have it running very well on 7 fips right now. Thanks for the tips. I think I had too many gauges loaded on each profile.

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