Program Compatibility Troubleshooter on Arm

Emulation to support x86 apps is a new feature created for Windows on Arm64. Sometimes the emulation performs optimizations that don't result in the best experience. You can use the Program Compatibility Troubleshooter to toggle emulation settings for your x86 app, reducing the default optimizations and potentially increasing compatibility.

Start the Program Compatibility Troubleshooter

You start the Program Compatibility Troubleshooter manually in the same way on any Windows PC: right-click an executable (.exe) file and select Troubleshoot compatibility. This screen appears.

If you click on Troubleshoot program you will be presented with the following options.

All options enable the settings that are applicable and applied on Windows Desktop PCs. In addition, the first, second, and fourth options apply the Disable application cache and Disable hybrid execution mode emulation settings.

Toggling emulation settings

Warning

Changing emulation settings may result in your application unexpectedly crashing or not launching at all.

You can toggle emulation settings by right-clicking the executable and selecting Properties.

On ARM, a section titled Windows 10 on ARM or Windows 11 on ARM will be available in the Compatibility tab. Click Change emulation settings to launch a second window as here.

This window provides two ways to modify emulation settings. You may select a pre-defined group of emulation settings, or you may click the Use advanced settings option to enable choosing individual settings.

The grouped emulation settings reduce performance optimizations in favor of quality. Below are some grouped settings that you can select.

Select Use advanced settings to choose individual settings as described in this table.

Emulation setting	Result
Disable application cache	The operating system will cache compiled blocks of code to reduce emulation overhead on subsequent executions. This setting requires the emulator to recompile all app code at runtime.
Disable hybrid execution mode	Compiled Hybrid Portable Executable (CHPE), binaries are x86 compatible binaries that include native Arm64 code to improve performance, but that may not be compatible with some apps. This setting forces use of x86-only binaries.
Strict self-modifying code support	Enable this to ensure that any self-modifying code is correctly supported in emulation. The most common self-modifying code scenarios are covered by the default emulator behavior. Enabling this option significantly reduces performance of self-modifying code during execution.
Disable RWX page performance optimization	This optimization improves the performance of code on readable, writable, and executable (RWX) pages, but may be incompatible with some apps.

You can also select multi-core settings, as shown here.

These settings change the number of memory barriers used to synchronize memory accesses between cores in apps during emulation. Fast is the default mode, but the strict and very strict options will increase the number of barriers. This slows down the app, but reduces the risk of app errors. The single-core option removes all barriers but forces all app threads to run on a single core.

If changing a specific setting resolves your issue, please email woafeedback@microsoft.com with details, so that we may incorporate your feedback.