Yeah, I can understand wanting the downloader to exist outside of the game (so they can update a broken game out-of-band) - that's all reasonable.
The issue is, as you say, a single-threaded "download-extract-next" flow... It's 2020 and that's what we'd expect from a 90s game launcher. Steam and other game launchers/downloaders can all saturate an arbitrarily fast network connection. Heck, even Windows Update (BITS?) can do this well. A shame Asobo wasn't able to leverage any of this.
The amount of GPU is indeed strange - I think there's more than meets the eye here. There seems to be a lot of HTML/JS type stuff in the UI here, and I wonder if they are doing some kind of GPU-based full-screen rendered surface, rather than just having a simple oldskool Windows Forms app that does the downloading without GPU acceleration.
As I said in my other comment just now - the GPU usage is completely broken. When in foreground, the downloader uses about 15% of my GPU, but in the background it takes over 60%. It's just written very very poorly.
The issue is, as you say, a single-threaded "download-extract-next" flow... It's 2020 and that's what we'd expect from a 90s game launcher. Steam and other game launchers/downloaders can all saturate an arbitrarily fast network connection. Heck, even Windows Update (BITS?) can do this well. A shame Asobo wasn't able to leverage any of this.
The amount of GPU is indeed strange - I think there's more than meets the eye here. There seems to be a lot of HTML/JS type stuff in the UI here, and I wonder if they are doing some kind of GPU-based full-screen rendered surface, rather than just having a simple oldskool Windows Forms app that does the downloading without GPU acceleration.