Quote Originally Posted by Kittra View Post
I run FFXIV on a i7 3770k machine which reports all 4 cores and all 8 threads being utilized at 20-35%. So there is some merit to having more cores, but really it depends the type of CPU whether or not it can actually utilize them all for a single application.
I don't want to say you're wrong, but that's not how HT works. When a single-threaded (or poorly threaded game, which is most games) is scheduled to run, it's sent to the cores that are not busy. So you'll see all the cores in use at a 100% division of the number of cores. So 4 cores, 25%, 8 cores 12.5%, etc. But HT is not a real CPU core, it splits the CPU in half, so you have either 2 logical cores with half the ALU's or 1 physical core with all it's ALU's. Generally you don't want HT while playing games.

I wrote more here, but I think I'm preaching at the choir. Basically, untick some cores until at least one core is at 100% while running FFXIV and that will tell you how many cores it's designed to use.