Absolutely, but that still doesn't negate the fact that many games are simply coded for "dual-core" functionality and not full on multi-threading for 4+ cores.
Still on Wasteland 3 myself and it would appear it uses ~8 CPU "cores" (hyperthreading) at any given time. Two of those show higher usage though.
I honestly haven't checked how many cores most games I play are using at any given time. I'm not sure I actually care unless the game itself runs sluggish .
As I'm well aware, but that still doesn't fully explain how a game as wildly complex as Elite only manages to soak up 2 GB of RAM. That's nutsy. Even though most of the universe data is hosted server-side...the flight modeling, weapons systems, and traffic alone, I would imagine, should be pushing 3-4 GB of RAM at least. I mean, jump into a hazardous combat zone and there can be literally 20-30 ships per side, and it still doesn't cap 2 GB. That's some crazy optimization right there, despite whatever the game's flaws.
Perhaps it's designed to be good about conserving memory. It's possible it's the other way too. It's not designed well and doesn't do a good job of using what is available. The point was memory usage can be a bit misleading. A game might allocate more than it needs and just shove stuff in there it uses a lot and/or might need and keep it there. It kind of makes sense if you think about it.
A good example of this a lot of people can identify with is a default Windows 10 install. By default it will preemptively store commonly used stuff in memory. This way when it's needed it's already there. This can make the memory usage of the OS misleading. Assuming you don't turn the functionality off.
This kind of ties into the concerns over some of the newer 3000 series Nvidia cards having X amount of vram. People see a game using X amount of vram and blindly assume it absolutely needs to use this amount to run efficiently. It's more complicated.