I guess don’t upgrade to new hardware..

This capture is the smoking gun, and it points completely away from CPU/hyperthreading.

Across this full 30-minute capture, 97.8% of it — roughly 29.5 of the 30 minutes — is dead silence

I have process monitor watching as I try to understand this slow loading loop of death because I don't want to disable hyperthreading on the bios.
Using a bat file to set affinity for p cores that are evens only (since that apparently bypasses the hyperthreaded cores) to no avail.

Read on if you're curious about Claude's observations of this weird modern hardware issue:

(gaps over 1 second between events), with the same zero-CPU thread-churn signature as before. Real work happens in tiny bursts totaling well under a minute of actual activity. That alone confirms this was never a CPU-scheduling or thread-count problem; the process spends almost the entire time doing nothing at all.

Here's the sequence that matters: the game doesn't attempt a single network connection until 15.5 minutes after the process starts. When it finally does, it connects over HTTPS to awsglobalaccelerator.com — that's AWS Global Accelerator, a routing layer companies put in front of their backend services, almost certainly fronting Ubisoft Connect's authentication/entitlement/license-check servers. Those connections succeed quickly (a flurry of connect/disconnect/reconnect across several ports within about 5 seconds — normal connection-pooling behavior, nothing wrong there).

Then it goes completely silent again for about 9.5 minutes (7:16:53 PM → 7:26:23 PM) — no file, registry, or network activity of any kind — before making a second round of connections to the same AWS-fronted host. That 9.5-minute dead gap right after the first successful handshake is almost certainly the "9 minutes no activity" you noticed earlier, and it's the single largest chunk of your load time. Only after that second connection attempt does the game start doing anything resembling real game activity — by the end of this capture (7:31 PM, ~30 minutes in) it's sending/receiving UDP to a separate game-server-looking IP and reading sound/music files, which suggests it had actually gotten through to a menu or gameplay state by then.

Put together: this reads like the game is waiting on a slow or stuck response from Ubisoft's own authentication/entitlement backend — not your PC at all. That fits the broader context too: Ubisoft just shipped two rushed patches in the last week and a half (the loading-time fix and the anti-cheat removal), and pulling EAC very likely pushed a wave of returning/reinstalling players through the same activation servers right now. A backend under unusual load producing exactly this "quick connect, then a long silent stall before the next step" pattern would be entirely plausible and outside anything fixable on your end.

A few things worth trying given this:

If Ubisoft Connect/the game supports launching in offline mode, try that — it would skip this exact online entitlement check and might load in a fraction of the time, at least as a test to confirm the theory.

Check Ubisoft's status page or their support socials for reported server issues in the last few days — given the timing, I'd expect other players hitting this too.

If you're running a VPN, proxy, or a custom DNS resolver, try temporarily disabling it — anything adding latency or extra hops to reaching an AWS Global Accelerator endpoint could stretch out exactly this kind of stall.

And practically: since the log shows it does eventually get through and start doing real work, if you're not in a hurry, just letting it sit past that ~9-10 minute mark seems to actually resolve on its own — which, frustratingly, may be the most reliable "fix" until Ubisoft's backend settles down.