Python program runs unexpectedly slow on my system

Question

I hope that I am asking this question in the right place. I have a Python program that is training an AI to play a video game. There is a lot of computation to be done, so I would expect it to be slow (although this is a very simple game).

I thought that my speed was normal, when someone who was helping me with the code said that it ran on his system 20X faster than on mine (on a 2012 computer). I am trying to figure out why this is not working for me.

I have a Dell XPS 9570, so it should be relatively fast. I was using Spyder (with Anaconda) to run the python program. This was super slow. I tried just using virtualenv. It was slightly faster, but still nowhere near the speeds that the other user was getting. I checked and made sure that my Python has access to all my CPU cores. I even tried using tensorflow-gpu and train using my GTX-1050 but that did not help.

What may be the problem? What should I try to fix? By the way, I tried this on two different computers with the same results.