Why does my game run so slowly?

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frans
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Why does my game run so slowly?

Postby frans » Sun Sep 28, 2014 6:43 pm

so yeah the title says it all.
Whenever i put my game at "speed3" it goes slow as f anyways, just slightly faster than speed 1 and it took my workers around 20 minutes of real time to build a really little part of my future prison.
Watching northernlion in his videos i can see how the time runs much faster and i can't udnerstand what i'm doing wrong as i've already looked into the game options and did a google search about the problem
thanks in advance!
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xander
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Re: Why does my game run so slowly?

Postby xander » Sun Sep 28, 2014 6:56 pm

Well, there are several reasons that the game could be running slowly. Your hardware might not be up-to-snuff or your prison could be very large. There could be other background tasks stealing processor time. There could be bugs. There is no way to know without more information. What version of the game are you running? How large is your prison (both in terms of the physical size of the map and in terms of how many prisoners you have)? What hardware are you running the game on? What processor and video card? What operating system are you running? What version of that operating system is running? Are all of your drivers up to date? What optimizations have you enabled or disabled at the OS or video card level? etc.

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frans
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Re: Why does my game run so slowly?

Postby frans » Sun Sep 28, 2014 7:12 pm

hey xander!
thanks for the answer, but maybe i didn't explain myself properly.
The thing is not that i'm having low fps in game, those are just fine.. i see my workmen moving smoothly around and whenever i drag my mouse around to check the whole map it is smooth as well, so i don't really know..
To answer your questions, i just created a new prison with a "medium" map and i was just starting building the fundaments for the prison after a quick planning of what i wanna do.
My pc should be fine too, i mean i can run some heavier fps games such as cod mw3 and cs:go at 120+ fps so i'm not too too worried about it
As for the drivers, yes they are all up to date and my windows version is 7 home suit (or something like that) which is strictly original and up to date.
I'm gonna try now with the game cache verifier from steam to see if that helps and/or download the whole game again
Thanks again :D
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Re: Why does my game run so slowly?

Postby xander » Sun Sep 28, 2014 7:24 pm

You really haven't answered most of my questions. Comparing Prison Architect's performance to the performance of other games (rather than just posting your hardware) doesn't help. The games that you are using as comparison utilize the GPU quite heavily, which means that an underpowered GPU is likely to cause the game to run slowly. Prison Architect does not use the GPU that heavily, but will gulp up any spare proc cycles on the CPU that it can find. The bottleneck could be your CPU, and I wouldn't be able to tell based on a comparison to some other game.

Going back to your original post, you have watched movies where you see time go faster. You do realize that there is an option to record "timelapsed" video, right? Some of the really fast videos that you see are recorded using that feature, which is not a viable speed for the game.

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Re: Why does my game run so slowly?

Postby frans » Sun Sep 28, 2014 10:56 pm

xander wrote:You really haven't answered most of my questions. Comparing Prison Architect's performance to the performance of other games (rather than just posting your hardware) doesn't help. The games that you are using as comparison utilize the GPU quite heavily, which means that an underpowered GPU is likely to cause the game to run slowly. Prison Architect does not use the GPU that heavily, but will gulp up any spare proc cycles on the CPU that it can find. The bottleneck could be your CPU, and I wouldn't be able to tell based on a comparison to some other game.

Going back to your original post, you have watched movies where you see time go faster. You do realize that there is an option to record "timelapsed" video, right? Some of the really fast videos that you see are recorded using that feature, which is not a viable speed for the game.

xander

so i'm posting from another pc so i'm not too sure about the exact name of the components.
i do however have a quadcore 2.2ghz as processor and as video card a nvidia gt 540m i believe (it's 2gb)
i'll add just for the sake of it that csgo is actually a cpu based game rather than gpu :P but that wont help anyways
i did not enable/disable any feature of the video card, i left it as it was on default except a few things that don't matter (raised saturation)
I'll check that time lapse thing tomorrow and see how it turns out
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Re: Why does my game run so slowly?

Postby xPyr0x » Sun Sep 28, 2014 10:59 pm

Open your save file in notepad++ and see how many lines the default map is that runs at 200 fps. Now open your save and see how many millions of lines are in it. The bigger it is, the more it lags.
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Re: Why does my game run so slowly?

Postby Trollitito » Mon Sep 29, 2014 2:30 pm

I doubt with that hardware you can't run this game. I can't play cs:go because my computer is old and this game works well without lag, but obviously i don't get anything over 60fps (maybe in max zoom). If a 2.2Ghz dual core with an 256Mbram video card can run it without major problems, yours should be much more than fine.

So, the problem isn't the hardware itself but some other configuration of it or perhaps something in windows.
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Re: Why does my game run so slowly?

Postby xPyr0x » Tue Sep 30, 2014 12:39 pm

I've got a 4ghz 6 core phenom II, 1gb 6870 video card, 16gb ram. This game still lags BAD once you build up. It don't matter how good your computer is, it will always lag once you fill the map up ;-P
Until they optimise it, or do some kind of changes to allow multi core support. (even phones have more than 1 core now)
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Re: Why does my game run so slowly?

Postby VoiD88 » Wed Oct 01, 2014 5:10 am

The game already has multicore support since Alpha 15. Go and play Alpha 14 and earlier if you want to see a really laggy game ;)
The problem with multiple CPU cores is that software developers can't just make their software use multiple cores whenever they are present. Specific parts of the code need to be run on what is called a separate thread and that is definitely not an easy thing to accomplish. Since Alpha 15, the part of the code that makes entities (prisoners and staff members) calculate which path to go through the prison is running on a separate thread, thanks to Johnny Knottenbelt who has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence.
Also, multicore support won't solve all performance problems of a software. PA has been somewhat optimized for performance, but it's still in Alpha and thus a long way from being REALLY optimized. Just be patient, whenever Introversion gets around to do it, they will make the game run a lot better. But that's not usually a part of Alpha development ;)
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Re: Why does my game run so slowly?

Postby xander » Wed Oct 01, 2014 4:50 pm

It should also be noted that using multiple cores is unlikely to actually improve the overall performance that much, even with fairly optimized parallel code. One of the major hurdles in Prison Architect is pathfinding, which is a *hard* problem in computer science (like, NP-hard, I believe). The complexity of the problem being solve (and, therefore, the amount of processing power needed to offer the same level of subjective speed) grows exponentially with the size of the map (which we would expect to grow more or less linearly with the number of prisoners). The linear performance boost of adding an additional processor is quickly swamped by the exponential growth in the complexity of the problem.

Long story short: parallel code is not a panacea.

xander

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