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!