Only a single core is being utilized by the CPU during gaming.
Only a single core is being utilized by the CPU during gaming.
You're experiencing low FPS in Hearthstone 4, and the Task Manager shows you're using just a single core. This often happens when your system is under heavy load or has limited resources. Checking CPU usage and ensuring you have enough RAM (you mentioned 6GB) can help improve performance.
The latest version of Hearts of Iron 4 was released in December 2021, with minor bug fixes and the most recent update coming on April 7, 2022.
It seems all eight cores are being engaged to some extent. With a 4-core processor that supports hyperthreading, you can combine two images at once and overlay them—this reveals each core is working fairly well. Even when viewed in the example, only about 35% utilization is shown, which equates to roughly one-third of the cores being active, or approximately 2.66 CPU cores being used at full capacity. You might want to use the CPU Affinity tool to direct a game or application to utilize just a subset of cores and observe the exact processing load. For more details, check https://www.d7xtech.com/daffinity/, or you can explore Task Manager or free utilities from Microsoft SysInternals (download available).
The software achieved balance, yet Hoi4 continues to operate significantly slower than expected.
The information shown in the Task Manager Performance section refers to CPU Utilization, not actual CPU usage. This metric becomes irrelevant for Intel mobile processors due to how their performance calculations work. The numbers are based on the processor’s base frequency and can be misleading because Intel Turbo Boost can push the CPU closer to 100% even when usage is low. Similar inaccuracies appear in the Resource Monitor, especially on Intel chips with significant turbo boost activity. These graphs often misrepresent how many cores or threads are fully engaged. The utilization data is unreliable and doesn’t reflect real performance. For example, an Intel 11300H chip starting from the 11th Gen no longer lists a fixed TDP value. Power limits on these devices can restrict performance, possibly due to thermal or power constraints rather than CPU throttling. To check GPU-related throttling, tools like GPU-Z are useful.
Apologizes for bringing up the thread, I’m not sure what the issue was—I just found that restarting your computer helps. I don’t understand how it works, but it does. I’ve played around and managed to go from a full second to two hours or even a whole day after a reset. I’ll add more screenshots later in case anyone needs them. Before the reset, this is what I saw.