While not every user runs to see how hardware resources are being used while gaming, there are still many enthusiasts who regularly open up their stats to see how certain games and other applications are being handled by the hardware. . During such a test execution, CapFrameX, which developed a useful frametime analysis tool, noticed a strange anomaly when measuring the performance of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D on Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
The reported processor usage on Windows 11 build 22621 appears to be unusually low in one specific scenario of executing a game, which is usually quite stressful for the CPU. Only one of the 16 threads seems to be reporting correct usage, while all other threads are below 10% usage.
While CapFrameX isn’t sure what’s causing it, it noticed the problem: CPU core usage reporting on Windows 11 is completely incorrect. For this particular situation and setup (Shadow of the Tomb Raider), the normal should be >80%, what happened to cause the exception? Has a recent update changed the behavior of processor occupancy monitoring?
CapFrameX provides a screenshot of the relevant situation. Statistics are displayed on screen using CapFrameX’s own tools, and are attached along with snapshots of HWiNFO showing similar data. While it’s possible that the bug noted here is an application-specific issue, CapFrameX believes that it persisted across all games tested.
It is worth noting that, in addition to CapFrameX, there may be HWiNFO, which is based on the Windows Event Viewer (ETW) tracking mechanism, so there may be some kind of bug in ETW, which leads to this misreading.
Googling the issue, we found a thread on the Microsoft forums where user AndreasRes reported a similar issue. In this case, we noticed a very high usage rate of the job admin, even reaching 100%, while the usage rate of the Xbox Game Bar and the MSI motherboard utility Dragon Centre was much lower.
Although the post is from last year, more users have recently joined in to report issues in 2022, with the latest build 22621 beta being the main place for the issues.
