Pixel Puzzles Ultimate – How to Fix Low FPS and Stuttering Issue Guide

 

ENGLISH: The fix.

The game seems to rely on Windows timing function to determine how to properly release processor when the game finishes processing current frame but the next one is still many milliseconds away. However, this has always been known as a tricky thing. WIth the game being more complicated than before, this method broke… but actually not!

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The following might not exactly be true, but observations imply at least similar mechanism.

The game determines how much time remains till the next frame. If it is more than “SleepMargin”, it sleeps. On Windows, sleep(int time) function will usually not work properly if BeginTimePeriod was not called properly in the code. By default, Windows will either yield right away or will wake the process after time quota, which is ~17ms. This causes frames to skip and is easy to reproduce in C++.

However, SleepMargin is a parameter that is loaded on startup from ini file.
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Looks like the solution is to increase the value from default “1” to more than a frame. I did 80, although 16.666 for 60FPS or 20 for 50FPS should be enough.

So, the solution:
In game folder “steamapps\common\Pixel Puzzles Ultimate”, there is “options.ini”. It contains 5 lines of text, last of which is SleepMargin=1.

Change that to SleepMargin=80, and the game won’t stutter anymore.

You may experience short stuttering when the game loads anyway though. If that is the case, change CreateTexturesOnDemand=1 to CreateTexturesOnDemand=0. This seems to preload all of the textures at the cost of increased startup time but eliminates stuttering shortly after load.

If all the above removed lags from the game when you do nothing, but the game stutters each time you do some action, the problem is in savefile then: its an ini file which stores whether a piece was locked into place as a separate value for each piece. It gets bloated and, since HDD speeds are not too high, reading and writing that file will bottleneck the game performance.

Note that the savefile contains only “pieces locked” data. Actual game progress, like whether puzzle was completed at least once, your hints, your gold pieces, etc., is stored in steam stats and achievements. You can disable steam cloud and remove that file to remove those lags; this will cause all puzzles to have their pieces to unlock. If you have puzzles that need one more piece to be finished and you are waiting for double/triple gold events to score big, deleting this file will be devastating to you. But if not, you can try that, BUT MAKE SURE TO BACKUP THE FILE FIRST!

 

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