# Is there a (reliable) way to tell how many cores a game/program uses?



## Octopuss (Aug 8, 2017)

Neither Task Manager nor Process Explorer shows anything useful in this regard. Is it even possible to monitor this somehow? Is there such software?


----------



## EntropyZ (Aug 8, 2017)

Haven't found anything of the sort. Since OS schedules how cores are used most of the time. The only *reliable* way to know seems to be by decompiling the executable and deobfuscating the thread instructions used for the game/program functions.

Even then you aren't going to get far if you're not good at C or Assembly language.

I'm just used to the guesswork by looking at which threads are used the most on average and decide how many of the threads are used effectively.

Some game engines give hints to how many threads are used by the use of .ini settings.

Maybe there's an idea, someone needs to make this kind of software that can do that by hooking into Direct3D for games. I wonder if it's possible to monitor exact core count usage that way, maybe if there was enough money involved. I don't know, correct me if I am wrong.


----------



## Octopuss (Aug 9, 2017)

I was sceptical from the beginning, and it seems I was correct.
I play Elder Scrolls Online and I get the impression it's not optimized for more CPU cores at all, but I can't tell. Guess I never will.


----------



## GoldenX (Aug 9, 2017)

Heh, War Thunder uses a single thread no matter what. It doesn't even get shared with the others, you always have "core 3" at 99% an the other 3 at 2%.

Use MSI afterburner or simply task manager while running the game and watch the core's usage, if you see something similar to 50% on a quad thread CPU, then you know the game only uses 2 threads.

Time to test the new Linux gl_thread, forced multithreading for any OpenGL game!


----------

