Stuttering performance/audio problems?

[SqueakyGibson]

4 out of 5 times that I load the game, it suffers from very frequent performance stuttering whenever anything happens, which is most obvious by hearing clipping audio. But then, around 1 out of 5 startups the game is smooth and fine. I wish I could understand what causes it.

Does anyone have experience with this issue?

No matter what settings I choose, the game uses 100% of my CPU and less than 20% of my GPU. I feel it shouldn't really be maxing out my CPU (E8500 3.16GHz), and I wish I could get it to hog the processor less.

[Mr. J.D. Gumby]

That seems to be the only way to do it. :( The sound issues are killing my desire to play through a second time... :/

[Dark_4ce]

Although... This may be too early to tell, and I'm sure people have tried this. But so far, after some experimenting, I seem to be getting it to work "most" of the time now by rebooting my computer. Basically after a full shut down and then turning on, I start steam and then South Park right away. I make sure nothing is running in the background and have turned off all windows visual settings (not sure if that has anything to do with it though). Anyway, this seems to yield playable sessions most of the time.

But I'm not ruling out luck. So give it a go. Maybe some sort of memory leak thing...

[LGM1979]

Noticed this a couple times early on right after release, then it was fine. Today it's a mess, lagging like crazy at all times, a big downer in battle when trying to block. No reason for this nonsense, just release working games, end of story. I pop a game in my 3DS, it works exactly the same every time!

[MrBones]

Found a solution for no (low) voice in cutscenes:
Go to the Sound application. Click on Speakers, then click the Configure button in the lower left corner of the window. This will bring up the Speaker Setup window.
Switch to "Stereo" and proceed until the end.
This should work.

[Wahooka]

I solved some of my audio problems by lowering the screen resolution. Tr.... tr... tr... try it :)

[XIII flinz]

This game has had very weird audio stuttering/clipping in windows 7 for me. It's bearable but far from good.

[imnotgoats]

I lowered my resolution to 1280x720 and lowered my audio device to CD quality (as recommended in another thread I read). I still get the stuttering issue. It appears to be worst during autosaves.

[Stanto]

Sigh. The game was fine for me when I bought it last week, and now, stuttering, stuttering everywhere. It's pissing me off.

[travysh]

I get constant stutter and 95-100% cpu usage on my Pentium G630 (dual core 2.7 GHz) where as it plays fine on my laptop from 2008 with a Core 2 duo P8600 (dual core 2.4 GHz) at 80-90% cpu usage. I've tried lowering resolution all the way to 640x480, I've set windows to cd quality stereo sound, I've verified the steam cache, nothing so far as helped. I get that the G630 is a low end cpu, it's in a media center pc, but other than less l2 cache it's a better cpu.

Pretty frustrating after playing tombraider problem free and then a game as simple as this runs so terribly

[imbarkus]

Hey everybody, I was having this issue too but I've been having some luck hopping over to Task Manager after starting the game and setting Priority for the process to BelowNormal. I'm no scientician but after doing some reading I guess that the high CPU utilization was borking some audio processing so I made it back off enough for things to function. The game is not without occasional hitches now (usually when walking around) but combat and audio works okay for me. Let everyone know if it works for you or if I'm chasing an untamed ornithoid without cause.

[Kaji2501]

Simple solution to a dumb problem caused by bad programming by the dev

Step 1: Launch game
Step 2: When running game, alt-tab out
Step 3: Run task manager by Ctrl+Alt+Del and hit "start task manager" (or type task manager in start search bar)
Step 4: under processes tab, find "South Park - The stick of truth.exe", right click it and select "set affinity"
Step 5: Make sure "<All Processors>" is selected

The problem seems to be that the game is a high CPU intensive game - I blame autodesk + obsidian, but I could be wrong, but for some reason, the game is offloading to one cpu. If you have 2+ cores, the problem is alleviated by spreading this load onto other cpu's.

Note, this worked for me and other people that I've talk to, but that is a small sample and this may or may not fix your problem. Good luck and leave some props if it does work for you.

Kaji

[Hans]

i don't seem to have that audio problem but mine the speach stops way before the characters actions for the speech finishes

[RXguy667]

Lowering my audio to “CD quality” in windows 7 settings fixed my audio issues.