The AMD Threadripper 2 CPU Review: The 24-Core 2970WX and 12-Core 2920X Tested
by Ian Cutress on October 29, 2018 9:00 AM ESTHEDT Performance: Rendering Tests
Rendering is often a key target for processor workloads, lending itself to a professional environment. It comes in different formats as well, from 3D rendering through rasterization, such as games, or by ray tracing, and invokes the ability of the software to manage meshes, textures, collisions, aliasing, physics (in animations), and discarding unnecessary work. Most renderers offer CPU code paths, while a few use GPUs and select environments use FPGAs or dedicated ASICs. For big studios however, CPUs are still the hardware of choice.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Corona 1.3: Performance Render
An advanced performance based renderer for software such as 3ds Max and Cinema 4D, the Corona benchmark renders a generated scene as a standard under its 1.3 software version. Normally the GUI implementation of the benchmark shows the scene being built, and allows the user to upload the result as a ‘time to complete’.
We got in contact with the developer who gave us a command line version of the benchmark that does a direct output of results. Rather than reporting time, we report the average number of rays per second across six runs, as the performance scaling of a result per unit time is typically visually easier to understand.
The Corona benchmark website can be found at https://corona-renderer.com/benchmark
Corona scales well with cores, although memory bandwidth also helps. The 2970WX sits behind the 2990WX amd the 2920X sits behind the 2950X, as expected.
Blender 2.79b: 3D Creation Suite
A high profile rendering tool, Blender is open-source allowing for massive amounts of configurability, and is used by a number of high-profile animation studios worldwide. The organization recently released a Blender benchmark package, a couple of weeks after we had narrowed our Blender test for our new suite, however their test can take over an hour. For our results, we run one of the sub-tests in that suite through the command line - a standard ‘bmw27’ scene in CPU only mode, and measure the time to complete the render.
Blender can be downloaded at https://www.blender.org/download/
Blender is also another render that likes a mix of cores and memory, being able to put all of the the 2990WX cores to good use. The 2970WX also comes in under two minutes on this test, while the 2920X only just beats the previous generation 1920X.
LuxMark v3.1: LuxRender via Different Code Paths
As stated at the top, there are many different ways to process rendering data: CPU, GPU, Accelerator, and others. On top of that, there are many frameworks and APIs in which to program, depending on how the software will be used. LuxMark, a benchmark developed using the LuxRender engine, offers several different scenes and APIs.
Taken from the Linux Version of LuxMark
In our test, we run the simple ‘Ball’ scene on both the C++ and OpenCL code paths, but in CPU mode. This scene starts with a rough render and slowly improves the quality over two minutes, giving a final result in what is essentially an average ‘kilorays per second’.
It has been pointed out to us that LuxMark is affected by the Spectre/Meltdown patches, so consider this more of a synthetic test of different code paths.
LuxMark in C++ mode seems to be able to take advantage of the extra memory bandwidht on the EPYC platform. Our Skylake-X processors never seem to be able to run the OpenCL model, but we see there are problems above 16 cores in this part of the test.
POV-Ray 3.7.1: Ray Tracing
The Persistence of Vision ray tracing engine is another well-known benchmarking tool, which was in a state of relative hibernation until AMD released its Zen processors, to which suddenly both Intel and AMD were submitting code to the main branch of the open source project. For our test, we use the built-in benchmark for all-cores, called from the command line.
POV-Ray can be downloaded from http://www.povray.org/
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schujj07 - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
You would be far to limited with RAM to run 60 VMs on that system. I've got 80 on dual Dell 7425's with dual 24 Core Epycs and 512GB RAM and I'm already getting RAM limited.Again I wouldn't install ESXi on these. Use Win 10 and Workstation for your test/dev and you will have a more agile system. If you don't need it for testing that day you still have Windows. FYI I'm VMware Admin.
Ratman6161 - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
All depends...in my home lab environment (which lets me test things at will and do whatever I want as opposed to at work where even the lab is more locked down) . For me, the Threadrippers would be great...but extreme overkill. I actually use old FX8320's which I bought when they were dirt cheap and DDR3 RAM was cheap too. The free version of ESXi works fine for me too. For my purposes the threadrippers would be really cool but more expensive than they would be worth.Icehawk - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
I would love one of these high cores boxes for our test lab, using W10 and VM on my desktop is very limiting for me (work rig is 7700 & 32gb) - one of these would let me put plenty of resources onboard. Currently my lab runs off a G6 Dell server which is totally fine but if I could get myself a new, personal, lab I'd want a TR rig since it can host a lot more RAM than Intel's option.odrade - Tuesday, October 30, 2018 - link
Hi I completely agree with you.With security enhancement moving to sandbox/VM (Application Guard, Sandboxed Defender in 19H1) virtualization scenario will be more prevalent beyond developper or test scenarios.
One major disappointment is that after 12+ months since GA there is no support for nested virtualization for TR/TR2 ?, Ryzen ? Epyc ?.
This issue seems to be general and not limited to hyper-v (KVM, etc..).
This is strange since EPYC made is way through Azure or Oracle Cloud catalog.
During Ignite 2018 there was a demo with an EPYC box (VM or Server).
Regards G.
GreenReaper - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link
You could ask for HyperV over here:https://windowsserver.uservoice.com/forums/295047-...
But such features are often buggy in their initial implementations:
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/vme-broken-on-amd-ryze...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/8ljgph/has_t...
It wouldn't surprise me if they ran into too many problems to want to push out a solution. And Intel has had issues here too - most recently L1 Terminal Fault relating to EPT:
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/understanding-l1-te...
If people buy enough of them, and there is a performance benefit or it otherwise becomes a feature differentiator, support will doubtless be developed. Chicken and egg, I know.
odrade - Monday, November 5, 2018 - link
Hi,Thanks four your inputs.
This feature is handy if you want to build advanced lab scenarios while preserving your work environment or avoid the hassle to use dual boot.
Maybe this feature will be enabled with the 2019 Epyc / TR iteration.
And if the the socket and compatibility promises is kept by AMD refreshing
my setup will do it and put those extra pcie lanes to use (upgrading storage as well).
At least the 7mm process will help to kept the power compatibility in line.
Regards G.
Blindsay - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
For the chart on the last page, the "12-core Battle" it would be interesting to see a "similar price battle" of like the 9900k vs 7820X vs 2920X. I suspect the 9900k would hold up rather well especially once it returns to its SRPmapesdhs - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
A battle for what? If it's gaming, get the far cheaper 2700X and using the difference to buy a better GPU, giving better gaming results by default (some niche cases at 1080p, but in general the 9900K is a poor value option for gaming, except for those who've gone the NPC route into high refresh displays from which there's no way back, ironic now NVIDIA has decided to move backwards to sub-60Hz 1080p with RTX).Blindsay - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
Definitely not for gaming lol. It is for a home server (unraid)PeachNCream - Tuesday, October 30, 2018 - link
That's a lot of compute for a home server. Home servers (outside of those used for the development of professional skills or to test software outside of a setting where there are office usage policies) serve very limited useful purposes. They're mainly a solution looking for a problem or just fun to mess around with. I have an old C2D E8400-powered desktop PC with 8GB of RAM that I just recently put online as a local file, media, and internal web server connected via a cheap TPLink PCI (non-e) wifi card. There's nothing that the kids and I have done to it yet that brings it anywhere close to its knees. Even streaming videos from it to three other systems at once is a non-issue and all of those files are stored on a single 1TB 5400 RPM 2.5 inch mechanical HDD. TR is extreme overkill for a toy server at home. Literally any old scavenged desktop or laptop can act as a home server.