StarCraft 2, 100% USAGE of at least 1 CPU??

I see norton hasnt gotten much better over the years.


Of course starcraft is using 100% of at least one CPU, thats what you want it to do, otherwise its indicative that something is keeping your CPU from pumping out as much data to the GPU as possible. All that message is actually saying is that Starcraft has at least one of your cores loaded up to full, it should have at least 2 loaded up to full if you were to watch it in task manager, why norton thought that warning was relevant and doesnt check to see if there is a full screen app going is beyond me.

so its nothing to worry about? CPUs are ment to be loaded to the max? Im new to this and would have thaught it would be more efficent to have to 2 running at 50%.

SC2 is quite CPU-intensive and will push your processor hard. I'm quite surprised that it manages to take a 2600k to 100%, but I suppose this happens with all eye candy turned on and lots happening on-screen.

On a separate note: I haven't used Norton for years, so I don't want to knock it too much, but in my honest experience, Internet Security suites just sit there and eat up CPU cycles. I switched to MS Security Essentials, and I'll probably never go back to a paid AV suite.

Ideally yes, it would be more efficient to spread the task across multiple cores and have them all running with some of the load, unfortunately most games are only coded in such a way to make use of two or three cores, getting a compiler to split your task across more than two cores takes quite a bit of work and you need to be very careful about data dependencies so that it can constantly use the cores, which is why most games still stick to loading up two or three cores to the max, and you really want it loaded up to the max otherwise your CPU isnt getting as much work done as it should.