TLDR: place one of the VCOMP110.dll in the same folder as A17.exe

These VCOMP110.dll files patch the omp_get_num_procs() call to return one (VCOMP110-1CPU) or two (VCOMP110-2CPU) cores. While this doesn't fix the idle wait issue that is in A17, it at least restricts the CPU waste to one core. Without this, the game will spin up (NUM_CPUS-1) worker threads. Thanks to KT's "fabulous" programming, worker threads are idle waiting and just waste CPU time.

With the 2CPU version, the game only spawns one worker thread. With the 1CPU version, I haven't seen the game spin up any at all. While I'm not sure how the game uses these worker threads (vcomp seems to be used for compiler-generated auto-parallelization), the 2CPU version may be more performant than the 1CPU version **if** the worker threads are actually used.

By default, the CPU use total is roughly (60% + (NUM_CPUS-1)*100%) - the first number is the main thread and probably depends on your CPU speed. So those with four cores are probably seeing 360% = (average) 90% in Task Manager. With the 2CPU dll you should see it drop to ~40%, and 1CPU dll you might see 15% (but the game might run slower).

This fix may also help with stuttering, which I suspect is caused by thread synchronization; all threads stop on a WaitForSingleObject call and variation in when the threads reach this location causes stutter.