A possible fix for lag/stutter

[Insanity Claus]

I recently had my latest prison begin to experience some chugging, so I went to fix it. Now it runs butter smooth.

Go to Task Manager, right-click "Prison Architect.exe", Set Priority to High, Set Affinity from All to Core 1.

It should run a lot smoother. This is because it's not running on the same core as your primary (core 0), but on the secondary one. PA is a single core game, as I understand it, so it doesn't need more than a single core affinity. Setting the priority to High just means that your telling this core to prioritize PA's data first.

When you run PA again, these Affinity and Priority settings will not be saved. There is a program called Prio[www.prnwatch.com] that will modify Task Manager with more features so you can save your affinity and priority.

[Jacki]

Wow! Just raising the Priority increases the frame rate x2 and eliminates the slowdown in a 400 cap prison almost completely. Setting Affinity to Core 1 didn't really help, it only got worse on my rig(including sound stutter). But thanks a lot!

[Insanity Claus]

I did some tweaking and realized Prio only saves Priority, not Affinity.

I found a program called Process Lasso[bitsum.com] that does save Affinity, Priority, and a bunch of other stuff. There is a paid version, but (AFAIK) Affinity and Priority saving are a permanent feature of the free version.

Using Process Lasso, I found that I had the best performance running on Cores 1-3 at High.

[cldbldkla]

ill try that, pausing the game to do all my tasks is getting old,but at least it dont stutter while paused for me.

[silaslancashire]

Wow indeed!! Priority increase is amazing at improving frame rate!! thanks!!!!!

[Red192]

launch PA, load the game, ALT+TAB, go into C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\Introversion\Prison Architect, delete the file DEBUG.txt (try another time if give an error)

Return to game,
enjoy

[nicholas.sommer]

Originally posted by Red192:

launch PA, load the game, ALT+TAB, go into C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\Introversion\Prison Architect, delete the file DEBUG.txt (try another time if give an error)

Return to game,
enjoy

I didn’t try it yet, but what does this? Why does it increase performance?

[murgh]

It doesn't. If your machine has problems with one file handle to write a line to a textfile once in a while then you are running this game on a very lowspec machine which wouldn't be capable of running it in the first place. Something like a 286 or so..

[murgh]

Perhaps his debug is on a floppy drive

[RagingRumskullian]

Originally posted by Red192:

launch PA, load the game, ALT+TAB, go into C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\Introversion\Prison Architect, delete the file DEBUG.txt (try another time if give an error)

Return to game,
enjoy

I think what you meant is Preferences.txt in AppData>Local>Introversion. Many people reported it improving performance.