That usually means its not utilizing quad cores. Even a game with a single thread can show activity on all 4 cores when looking at task manager. Because that's just how the windows scheduler works, but if you were to add up the usage, it would be around 25%. Which means a single thread.
back in the day .. WoW 40 man Raids
Late game Civ 5 with huge map and max civs does some damage to weaker cpu's
Definitely noticed an improvement from my Q6600 to 2500k.
pacman!
I still find it strange that no single core gets pegged at 100%
That is intentional and it is because of the thread scheduler in windows, it is intentionally migrating the 2 active threads, cycling them across the cores.
Supposedly this is done on purpose at the request of the CPU makers to reduce the average operating temperature of any given core such that the system uses less power (less static losses) and creates less fan noise.
I cannot confirm if this really is a request from the CPU guys, but I can confirm it really does result in lower temperatures and lower power consumption, but it also slightly lowers performance because the cache has to migrate every time the thread migrates. I can also confirm that the scheduler is at least intelligent enough that it knows to avoid double-loading a physical core or module with two threads, if it can it will avoid loading two threads on the same module and will avoid loading two threads onto an HT core.
The extra 5% or so of CPU activity is likely associated with the scheduler itself, shuffling data across cores and tracking it all with performance counters and the like.
Some programs will manage their own affinity locking which gets around the scheduler shenanigans, but most programs don't do that.
I wonder if forcing 2 cores would change performance in game noticeably.
Noticably? Not likely, not unless the game itself was already sitting on the hairy edge of a particular fps threshold where it made the difference with vsync or some such.
And when it comes to systems that have turbo-core/turbo-boost enabled and functioning it may actually hurt performance because locking the threads to a given core will increase its temperature and power-consumption which can result in the CPU dropping down in speed bin if it was running in a turbo bin.
Planetside -- Large 3 faction battle -- Esamir
I would say there are at least two active threads, because CPU utilization hits 45-55%.
I still find it strange that no single core gets pegged at 100%
Avalon said:Don't think it's the most CPU intensive, but Natural Selection 2 is the most demanding CPU intensive game I play. Game runs a crazy amount of LUA scripting, it absolutely kills CPU. It needs high clocks + high IPC.