Profile of Cyanara

Can anyone explain this phenomenon?

Yep. This game doesn't make effective use of hyper-threading (aka SMT on Ryzen), only real CPU cores. This means that Windows gets confused about how report overall CPU usage. Dividing cores into two threads often has performance gains for many applications, but it is definitely not the same as having two actual cores, so overall CPU usage is not accurate in this case.

Your dad's CPU is from when Intel didn't include hyper-threading on their mid and low-range CPUs (since they had no competition from AMD at the time). This means Windows is reporting CPU usage accurately as far as this game is concerned.

You can right-click on the CPU graph in Task Manager to show all of your CPU threads and see how loaded they are individually (Change graph to -> Logical Processors).

If you turn off SMT in your BIOS, you should see similar (and more accurate) CPU usage to the Core i5. However, even though Windows will report your CPU as being used much more, you shouldn't expect much, if anything, in the way of increased performance. Can't hurt to try, but you will likely lose performance in almost every other game if you don't re-enable it.

Ultimately, the COH2 engine is just terribly made. Troubled and rushed development aside, I've heard it was apparently made on an Intel compiler and really favours their CPUs. But that said, AMD literally didn't have a good gaming CPU until they very recently launched the Ryzen 3000 series nearly a decade later. Also, as you've noticed, even with an Intel CPU it can't use it all and only gets worse as each game goes on, regardless of GPU. I did some tests on a 9900K and performance was really not much better.

I run a Ryzen 1600 on desktop (with a GTX 1080) but I probably only get as low as 30-40fps towards the end of an artillery intensive 4v4 match. Your performance does seem unusually poor. I would have suggested thermal throttling, but I guess not based on your data.

I've never really played against a bunch of AI players though. I have to assume that would use more CPU than human players. Maybe try a couple of 3v3 automatch games and compare the end game frame rates?

It has always been a horribly overpowered ability with absolutely no counterplay. It has probably been overlooked a bit since the nerfs of the command panther, but in team games (and particularly on choke-pointy maps) it is just a terrible game mechanic as it allows rocket arty and other long range weapons to just go crazy for no risk.

My personal advocation has long been to make it grant longer sight range to units in the area of effect so that some risk is required in the form of actually sending units into the enemy territory. It seems that Sander93 has achieved something to this effect in his latest mod:

https://www.coh2.org/topic/106030/sander-s-personal-balance-changes

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Honestly, this is probably superior to plane scouting in terms of game mechanics given the troubled role of AA weapons and how planes are apparently killed with random deflections rather than actual HP damage(?).

does gsync or freesync even work for coh2? for me its always terrible flickering

Works fine for me. Unless you have a particularly low frame rate you really shouldn't notice flicker in COH2 anyway though since what's on screen doesn't change rapidly like when you flick your camera around in an FPS. Also, it should be more of a screen tearing than a flickering. It sounds like you may have a larger problem.

I'm not clear as to whether you have Gsync/Freesync yet, but try enabling V-Sync to see if it resolves the issue. If so, a decent Gsync/Freesync setup should work fine. V-Sync definitely has awful input lag though, so I'd only recommend using it diagnostically.

I went to 144Hz Gsync and could never go back. In highly optimised games like CSGO it's just so damn buttery smooth that it feels good every time I start a match.

But as blvckdream says, between the severe engine problems and lack of rapid camera movement/twitch reactions COH2 will reap few benefits. The low/inconsistent frame rates are where Gsync and Freesync help to make things more bearable, but they still won't make actual game input any more responsive.

- Playing with non-European people (Asia, US,...) the delay between a command is around 5 seconds on average (I count at game start how much time it takes for echelons to start moving, each time I see Chinese letters).

I know that it's not P2P and that you're connecting to a US server, however, if my knowledge of networks from 3rd year is still valid, the packets that arrive on the server from Europe and Asia need to be synced, hence the huge delay.

5 seconds to play against someone in the USA but not in Europe? That really doesn't make any sense to me. Say it's a 1v1 (for simplicity): If the servers and your opponent are in the USA and you're assuming that the latency of the two player connections is additive, then surely in that case the latency should be *lower* (or at worst, equal) compared to when you play someone in Europe? And if it's only the latency of the player furthest from the server (ie you), then it should be exactly the same experience playing against an American as playing someone in Europe.

At any rate, I've definitely never had a 5 second delay. Anything approaching one second is near unplayable, and I rarely have them despite being all the way over in Australia. However, I've been a significant proponent of the theory that battle servers make other player pings irrelevant, so your theory does have me re-evaluating that stance given that it very much is a sync-dependent game. But I'll make a separate post inviting critiques once I feel like I've properly thought it through. I'd really love to get to get my head around that whole system.

In regards to mismatching, I'm not sure there's much you can do about that. The player pool size is what it is, and I frequently get matched with top 20 players within 30 seconds of starting a 1v1 search. It would appear the system only cares if one of the players has been searching for longer than the search expansion threshold. I can't imagine it's much different for team games.