Games do not utilize all cores

[RuslanZab]

I have an AMD Ryzen 7 2700. When I play games my utilization of the first thread is at about 90%, but all others are at 30% and some are at like 5%. I tried a stress test, and all of the threads were used to 100%. Is this an issue with my computer or it is a widespread problem?

[The_russian]

It's likely just the fact that most games still don't utilize many cores and favor faster clock speeds. 

[Guest]

Most games just don't scale to 16 threads. Triple A titles may scale to about 8. 

The usage is just spread across the cores/threads...

 

[Guest]

Games usually only use one thread a lot, and the rest not so much, it depends on the game. It's normal

[Warat]

I see, wow this solves my curiousity. I have this one core that runs only 5-10% too while other cores were 50+%   Ryzen 5 3600 on apex legends ultra setting

[Sophia_Borjia]

The main thread and render thread telling gpu what to do are highly used.  Other things are easier to multi thread. 

 

The use in a game is also not constant, more ai enemies spawn or sudden need for lots of extra calculations do to something like a building blowing up in battlefield could cause a spike.  If a few cores are at 5%, they handle spike and core on render thread can keep feeding gpu.  If all cores are mostly used already this causes a a fps drop/shuddering/micro freeze ect..

 

More cores then needed stop drops below average fps and faster cores raise fps, to over simply.  i9-9900k tends to have highest peak/average fps, ryzen 9 has better 1% and .1% lows due to extra core there when needed.

 

Something doing lots of simulation and ai in background will make more use of extra cores.  Something with high fps but small map and players like COD will make more use of fast cores.  Both will use what is available to some extend.  

[Sophia_Borjia]

here is a graph of threads used in destiny 1 cosmodrone level on xbox 1.  Some of important ones get cores dedicated, most just wait turn to run on cores not needed for important threads. 

 

Notice it is way more then number of cores, a few threads max out their cores and rest are waiting most of time, some cores switching between threads and still not 100%.  It is very hard to spread something like a game evenly.  Just running a copy of single threaded program on each core with benchmark is easy.  Something like breaking render into tiles is also easy to multitask. 

 

Hour long talk from bungie the image is from.