I have an I7 5960X with 8 cores. I have similar interests as you have. I have not found that GalCiv is straining my graphics card. I haven't done max map with max ships, etc, but the game is just not the heavy graphics hog that many others are So I don't expect that will be an issue. Some of that depends on if you have a 4K screen or not. Those are greedy. I don't play the standard graphics intensive games that benefit from the single core speeds driving into extreme graphics cards. The best I use for that functionality is Star Swarm Stress Test, which is fun to watch as well as informative. GalCiv looks really good at high resolution, but it is not likely to be the most graphics heavy game in your library unless you are like I am, and I am strange.
CPU usage is what I would love to understand. I can tell that a load is distributed across the cores by looking at the standard resources monitor, but I don't see anything anywhere near maxing out. Overclocking has made the game noticeably snappier, but nothing dramatic. The between turn delay in a many faction game seems to be more about taking the time to move all of those ships around (along with tracking what is seen where while that happens) than any other load, . I couldn't tell you if that function is spread across cores or not. If it isn't, then it might respond to a higher single core speed.
The multithread portion seems to be working, but the AI considerations that are supposedly happening all of the time do not seem to be loading the system at all. It does not look like a recursive deep dive analysis type of environment. I am somewhat surprised by that, and disappointed. This rig is meant for another purpose, but when it is not "on the job" it is free and eager to be totally consumed by GalCiv for all it can do. At this point, that is not happening.
I don't know what benchmarking would be meaningful, or what tools to use. If you have suggestions, I would like to hear them.
