Yeah, xnormal is super. You can use all your threads on the CPU and use the GPU, on normal maps and AO. BUT, i have felt that maya's normal maps, in some cases, looks better. I have the same problem. Sitting on a 2600k it's using about 13% when baking. I have no idea what it is i'm afraid..
Thats because Maya uses Mental Ray, which just uses one thread per mesh/texture whatever.So just one Core is used , for example Core i7(HT enabled) you have 8 cores(4 physical and 4 logical) so if one core is used for 100% the load on your cpu would be 12,5%(which gets rounded to 13% obviously). If your mesh had multiple…