MSI Afterburner - CPU Cores used; how to interpret?

CuriousMike

Diamond Member
Feb 22, 2001
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I guess I have a more broad question: Can an application specify cores it wants work done on, or do they spawn threads and the OS takes care of assigning them to cores?

I've seen F1 2016 used as an example for Ryzen benchmarking, where it uses all 16 cores+threads.

I wondered if Dirt Rally was similar (Codemasters), and I found, in my example, it did not.

But it did consistently use 6 cores, often seeing 7 and 8 cores being used temporarily.
Side question: Is MSI Afterburner showing core load for this app, or is it reporting back what the OS says is happening? In which case, some part of the core load could be OS level things going on?

Dirt Rally at 4k Ultra - no able to maintain 60 but a good showing for my 480.
As a matter of fact, I do maintain 60 most of the time using the High Preset and but turning mirrors (not used in my hood camera view) and vehicle reflections to medium.
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