Hey everyone,I’ve been seeing a lot of reports about extremely high CPU usage and overheating issues affecting certain CPUs while playing. I’ve been trying to spot a pattern, but so far it seems to occur across many setups — especially with CPUs that have 8 or more cores.
Some players have attempted to fix this by creating a “user.cfg” file with their core and thread counts (you can find guides on YouTube or Google by searching “BF6 CPU issues”). However, for many users, this method doesn’t seem to help — even when matching their system’s exact core/thread configuration or limiting the game to fewer cores.
For example, on my i9-12900K:
I’ve also tried the following with no improvement:
To rule out cooling issues, I ran several demanding CPU benchmarks — none of them reached the same temperature spikes I get in-game.
Interestingly, some users reported this issue starting during the beta, while others (like me) only began seeing it after launch.
If you’re facing similar problems, please post your specs and list:
I’ll compile all the information from this thread and, if needed, send a detailed report to the devs.
Thanks for helping track this down.
— A long-time Battlefield fan who hasn’t been able to play since release due to this issue.
usercfg murders your 1% and 0.1% lows. Even if you match the cores/threads with it, just having the file in place on causes loss in performance via reducing CPU usage for no reason. I've tested that on my 14900k and had someone do the same on a 9800x3d and both of us came up with an indisputable fact that you should not do user.cfg
The game runs my CPU very hot, but it's not throttling and it's not hitting max load.
I suspect that the game does something with it's instructions in the engine that cause intel cores to heat up more than they should.
To the OP, what do you mean when you say "overheating" and "overloading".
Are you getting 100% CPU usage? Is it thermal throttling by hitting over 95c?
MackTKau you're correct. The game tries to spread the CPU load across all the cores evenly. The user.cfg does the opposite and concentrates the load onto a few cores, while other cores sit idle. This causes some of the cores to hit 100% utilization, which causes framerate drops and worse 1% lows.
You're also correct about the Frostbite engine using AVX2 SIMD instructions which causes CPUs to run hotter than normal. There's an AVX offset setting in motherboard BIOS which automatically downclocks CPU frequency when AVX instructions are executing. I don't use AVX offset because I think buying a better CPU cooler is the way to go.
AVX2 is what I thought it might be but since I don't know I didn't want to say. I do have a -2 offset in my system already, since the 14900k is a known superhot CPU especially when using AVX (I have a lot of bios tweaks to get my CPU in a sweet spot of performance vs temps).
I can see in hwinfo that the cpu p-core clock will bounce around from my bios set 5.6mhz to a 5.4 which suggests the AVX offset is working (as -2 equals 2 ratios, ie, 200mhz) when the game runs an AVX instruction.
Last night I cleaned out the dust in my PC fans & radiator fins, dropped the max temp by 15c lol. Easily the most effective tweak you can ever do is regular vacuuming and dusting. 🤣
People on hot intel CPUs who haven't been doing bios tweaks and might have weaker CPU coolers and haven't replaced thermal paste in a while (i use ptm 7950) is going to be some of the explanation of high temps. If they're using overly high settings for their system that's going to cause high temps as well.
MackTKau a good cleaning definitely helps. The i9-14900k is a nuclear reactor. It's pretty amazing there's air coolers on the market for $18 that can handle 200 watt CPUs. Although I'm sure the i9-14900k goes over 200 watts when overclocked.
