Game not utilising CPU to its fullest

As the title says, I think the game should be allowed to use more of the CPU's power. For instance, when I look at the team list, I see CPU: 70-100% near my nickname, but when I look at the spring.exe process in Task Manager, it hardly ever exceeds the 20% threshold. The CPU in question is AMD FX-8320.

TL;DR The game should use as much CPU as it wants to.

The game is using as using as much CPU as it wants. It only needs enough to process all of the commands and has no benefit from using more than one thread on a single PC.

Because Spring is 15-year-old software, and as such was originally built for single-core processors. There have been projects here and there to retrofit multithreading into the Spring engine, or even rebuild it from the ground up to support multithreading, but those have been difficult and slow-going.

Building multithreaded software is a monumental software engineering challenge when done from the start, and retrofitting software to be multithreaded makes even that look like a walk in the park. At this point I'm pretty sure there is some threading in Spring, though I'm not sure entirely where the separation is (probably between graphics data transfer and everything else), but unless some breakthrough in structuring the physics code comes up that allows arbitrary core usage while keeping the different cores' parts of the simulation in sync with each other, I doubt there's much that can be done to improve CPU usage.

What about using a hypervisor?

somot What GPU are you using? My game ran slow before I patched my graphics software. If it is not running slow I don't see a reason to care either way.

Shadowfury333 an easy way to use more CPU is to run more instances of the software. The reason anyone would run multiple instances of Zero-K on one machine is not my problem. Maybe someone could build a multi headed system for easier communication in team play.

Hi, Virtualbox will give you some virtual cores, each of which will map to one or less physical core, so I think you will be getting worse performance. Virtualbox cannot translate all 8 of your physical cores into one giant virtual core. Also, it will suffer on the graphics side.

RTSMP is/was a real thing. But it's also pointless for ZK due to both the heavy lua dependence and it not being open-source (and many other things that you better ask an engine dev for).