Oh, oh! It looks like the CPU usage reporting in Windows 11 is buggy. Multiple reports claim that the OS wrongly reports a system’s processor usage when performing intensive tasks.
And to make matters worse, this is happening as Microsoft is refreshing the native Task Manager.
The Task Manager is one of the operating system’s most vital components, which is why the company never really went for fancy redesigns for it—the clearest case of not fixing something when it is not broken.
But apparently, it is broken.
While not every user actively monitors their system’s resource usage, enthusiasts like gamers and power users often turn to these statistics to find out exactly how their hardware is handling games and other complex applications.
One such test was run by CapFrameX, developer of a useful frame analysis tool. The company noticed an odd anomaly when gauging the performance of the Lara Croft game Shadow of the Tomb Raider on the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D.
The processor usage that Windows 11 reports in this title is unusually low in one of the scenes where the game is typically known to be very intense on CPU. Weirdly, only about 1 of the 16 threads reported the correct performance, while all other threads on the processor were under 10% utilization.
While this can possibly be considered an application-specific issue, it is apparently present in all games that were tested.
Additionally, to add to the curiosity, this thread on the Microsoft forums has user “AndreasRes” talking about a similar issue where the Task Manager usage is either very high or at 100% when other tools like the Xbox Game Bar and the MSI Dragon Center are showing far lower usages.
Worth a mention here that both CapFrameX and possibly HWiNFO are based on the Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) tracing mechanism.
Perhaps there is some kind of a bug in ETW that is behind all this misreading?
Who knows?
