The AMD Ryzen 5 1600X vs Core i5 Review: Twelve Threads vs Four at $250
by Ian Cutress on April 11, 2017 9:00 AM ESTBenchmarking Performance: CPU Rendering Tests
Rendering tests are a long-time favorite of reviewers and benchmarkers, as the code used by rendering packages is usually highly optimized to squeeze every little bit of performance out. Sometimes rendering programs end up being heavily memory dependent as well - when you have that many threads flying about with a ton of data, having low latency memory can be key to everything. Here we take a few of the usual rendering packages under Windows 10, as well as a few new interesting benchmarks.
Corona 1.3
Corona is a standalone package designed to assist software like 3ds Max and Maya with photorealism via ray tracing. It's simple - shoot rays, get pixels. OK, it's more complicated than that, but the benchmark renders a fixed scene six times and offers results in terms of time and rays per second. The official benchmark tables list user submitted results in terms of time, however I feel rays per second is a better metric (in general, scores where higher is better seem to be easier to explain anyway). Corona likes to pile on the threads, so the results end up being very staggered based on thread count.
Blender 2.78
For a render that has been around for what seems like ages, Blender is still a highly popular tool. We managed to wrap up a standard workload into the February 5 nightly build of Blender and measure the time it takes to render the first frame of the scene. Being one of the bigger open source tools out there, it means both AMD and Intel work actively to help improve the codebase, for better or for worse on their own/each other's microarchitecture.
POV-Ray 3.7.1
Another regular benchmark in most suites, POV-Ray is another ray-tracer but has been around for many years. It just so happens that during the run up to AMD's Ryzen launch, the code base started to get active again with developers making changes to the code and pushing out updates. Our version and benchmarking started just before that was happening, but given time we will see where the POV-Ray code ends up and adjust in due course.
Cinebench R15
The latest version of CineBench has also become one of those 'used everywhere' benchmarks, particularly as an indicator of single thread performance. High IPC and high frequency gives performance in ST, whereas having good scaling and many cores is where the MT test wins out.
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Bp_968 - Sunday, April 16, 2017 - link
This is the point I try to make all the time to console players saying PCs cost too much, require too much upgrading. My i7 970 or 980 (I forget!) Is still playing modern games wonderfully @2560x1440 with a gtx 970. We reciently built a pc for my neighbor out of spare parts and he ended up with a core2 quad (q6600 maybe?) With 6gb ram and a gtx460. He quickly upgraded to a gtx 1050 and now it easily stomps his PS4 (and probably the PS4pro).I'm with one of the previous posters about chipset accessories. It won't be CPU speed that causes me to up upgrade, it will be me wanting access to new features (pcie4, usb-c, usb3.1/3.2, NVMe, Intels ddr/ssd hybrid memory interface, etc etc).
I also expect Intel to respond, at least in the ryzen7 market. I really hope it means Intel will finnally start offering 6-8 core CPUs in non-silly price points.
mmegibb - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
The choice of software hardly matters when what you are looking for is a collection of software that exercises the entire CPU subsystem: the cores, caches, memory, etc. As th3ron mentions, what matters is finding the deltas between CPUs.And yes, in spite of your snobbery, probably 50% of people reading this want to size their system for gaming. Gaming is the limiting case for my home builds.
psychobriggsy - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
Indeed gaming is important for many people.What the reviews show is that for a mixed-use system, the gaming aspect is not significantly behind Intel alternatives (obviously a couple of outliers, but that applies in both directions). However for the other uses, Ryzen is a complete win. It's good enough, rather than the pile of fail that Bulldozer core CPUs were. And indications are that games are getting more multithreaded over time, so buying a 4C product is limiting future gaming.
It's clear that Intel will have to enable SMT in their i5 refreshes this year now, as that should let them claw something back in the 'partial multithreaded' use cases (apps that can't scale indefinitely with extra cores but top out at 4-8 threads).
IanHagen - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
I completely agree on that. I'd love to see more compiling benchmarks too. It's coming to the point where people who are buying a CPU for productivity are taking decisions drawn upon conclusions heavily influenced by gaming performance.RafaelHerschel - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
50% of people use a fast CPU for gaming is a very conservative estimate. For regular office work or for media consumption an inexpensive CPU is fast enough. The current Intel Celeron and Pentium CPUs (or the AMD equivalent) offer much better value for most people. Because of marketing i3 and i5 CPUs sell well.And there are more gamers than professionals who use software that benefits from fast CPUs.
ddriver - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
Dunno about that, of all the people I know who have powerful machines, all do professional work, even those who game. Then again, the selection of my acquaintances has to do with their skills, and I do have to admit I have zero interest in interacting with someone who only plays games.I also know that is 99% of the games on the market cannot utilize 66.66% of that chip.
So you end up putting 50% of the review emphasis on tests that can only utilize 1/3 of the chip.
It is like... testing a sports car and putting 50% of the emphasis on its use as a hearse that will never be used at nowhere near its potential.
mmegibb - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
Man, ddriver, you are an elitist jerk. "I have zero interest in interacting with someone who only plays games". Also, "People who use winrar most likely do not make logical considerations, because if they did, they wouldn't be using garbage like winrar".Why are you like that?
vladx - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
Don't mind ddriver, he's just a pathetic troll who tries too hard.Meteor2 - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
I imagine the proportion of PCs containing higher than i5-7400s bought by consumers used for gaming is much higher than 50%.*Not* talking about business buys here, I'm talking about people spending their own money.
Meteor2 - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
D'oh, I just replied to ddriver. What was I thinking.