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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lefty2 - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
Yeah, also with the RX 480 the i5 7400 scores better then i5 7600 (by a huge margin)! That makes no sensesharrken - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
AdoredTV did a very interesting video about exactly this issue, called "Ryzen of the Tomb Raider". In pretty extensive testing they show that something is definitely wrong with Nvidia cards in DX12 on Tomb Raider.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tfTZjugDeg
On a Ryzen 1800X system, crossfire RX 480's beat out an overclocked Titan X, 90fps on the 480's and only 80fps on a Titan X - which is just ridiculously wrong when you look at the relative GPU power.
Some other people have run more tests, and a similar thing is happening in The Division, so it seems highly likely that Nvidia has some strange issues somewhere along the line with DX12.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/62n813/inspi...
milli - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
It's also happening in Battlefield 1, Deus Ex: MD & Total War: W.https://www.computerbase.de/2017-03/amd-ryzen-1800...
Are nVidia drivers not detecting Ryzen CPU's correctly or is it foul play?
mdw9604 - Thursday, April 13, 2017 - link
Poor AVX implementation /w AMD and the driver.milli - Thursday, April 13, 2017 - link
What has AVX to do with nVidia's DX12 drivers???bug77 - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
Really great job not throwing intel power consumption in there for comparison. /sIan Cutress - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
Mainly because that part of the discussion was purely to do with CCX arrangement and core loading.But sure, because you asked so nicely. /s They've been added.
bug77 - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
Thanks.Phiro69 - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
Could you comment on your Chromium Compile benchmark a bit; I'd like to use it as part of a pitch on why our compile farm needs replacing (e.g. "look what a $249 cpu can do").What OS did you build under, I'm guessing Windows 10 from your earlier statements in the full article?
Did you follow these directions for the most part? https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/m...
If so (and you used Windows 10), then you used Visual Studio? Which version and which license of VS?
Thanks! Great review!
Ian Cutress - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
Win 10 x64 Pro v1607, Build 14393.953. VS Community 2015.3 with Win10 SDK. I bascially followed the instructions in that link. :)