The $60 CPU Question: AMD Athlon 200GE or Intel Pentium Gold G5400? A Review
by Ian Cutress on January 14, 2019 8:00 AM ESTCPU 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 is an all-threaded test, and Intel’s frequency advantage comes into play here with a 15% win.
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 also uses a mixed instruction workload, though not to the extent that our 3DPM and y-cruncher workloads do. But as with those tests, we get an AMD win of 3.7%.
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’.
Interestingly we see AMD take the win for the C++ code by 5%, but Intel gets ahead with the OpenCL code (running purely on the CPU) by 10%.
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/
As another throughput test, here AMD is behind by 20%.
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Ratman6161 - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
One issue is though that at my favored place to buy CPU's (microcenter.com) The 2200G isn't $40 more, its only $30 more. The 200GE is $49.99 and the 2200G is $79.99. Add to that you can get a B450 motherboard for $59.99. So for just $30 more for the total system price and the fact that the 2200G/B450 combo guarantees overclocking capability, I couldn't really see going with either of the CPU's in this review.eastcoast_pete - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
Fully agree, and, at those prices (2200G at $ 79.99, plus mobo for $59.99), it's even more a closed and shut case. Neither the Athlon nor the Pentium come anywhere near the 2200G, especially if the iGPU is "it", which is likely for a budget system. The only scenario I can see for a builder to chose the Athlon or the Pentium is if they a. are on sale, and b. if it's for one's parents or grandparents, and all they want to do is browse the web and some occasional light office work. But, even there, if one can swing the extra $30, why not get the much more capable 2200G? With the added ability to play some games, maybe you'll visit more often (:GreenReaper - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
I was thinking this throughout - "wow, this review is a great advertisement for the 2200G!"Personally I'd like to wait for a chip with AV1 support, Navi and PCIe 4.0, but it seems likely that you'll be able to upgrade to all of that at a later date if you pick your motherboard right.
DominionSeraph - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
Can you put the venerable i5 2500 in the new Bench? With used systems available for $90 it's the price/performance champion.jordanclock - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
On the Overclocking page:"In recent weeks, motherboard manufacturers have been releasing BIOS firmware that enables overcooking on the Athlon 200GE."
I know OCing can increase temperatures, but calling it overcooking might be a little strong.
mczak - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
Ian,I think you might want to rephrase every paragraph which has "AVX" in it. From your wording it sounds like you're surprised the pentium doesn't benefit much from the use of AVX, whereas the truth is it doesn't support AVX at all, hence even if you use avx-optimized binaries it's still going to use an sse-only path.
This is of course a reversal of the other Core chips vs. Ryzen - intel typically benefits quite a bit more from AVX code, since it actually has simd units which are physically 256bit wide, whereas Ryzen only has simd units which are 128bit wide.
GreenReaper - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
I agree, I was a little confused when I saw talk of AVX for the Pentium - don't get me wrong, SSE optimizations can provide great benefits (compare 'openssl speed -evp' to 'openssl speed' on a Celeron), and probably they are used by the "optimized" path but it's not going to give the same results.As you say, "supports" is debatable on Ryzen. But even if a CPU didn't really support it on a hardware level at all (which is not the case), its use might result in improvements due to the ability to provide a microcode equivalent than is faster than the SSE-based alternatives.
silverblue - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
It's not really debatable in my eyes - it may be half-speed, but there's no AVX offset - as far as I can tell - to worry about. When Zen 2 pops up, perhaps it'll have to behave more like Intel's implementation.eastcoast_pete - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
Agree. After all, in the Intel universe, the absence of AVX is a key differentiator between the Pentium and the core i3; if you want hardware-supported AVX extensions, you have to fork over the extra $$$ and get at least the entry-level core chip.kkilobyte - Monday, January 14, 2019 - link
I'd like to know where one would find the G5400 at 60$, or even at the same price as the 200GE.I don't seem to be able to find the G5400 in Europe for less than 75€. On the other hand, I can get a 2000GE at 55-60€.
For example, Materiel.net - one of the most popular online shops in France and Belgium, has the cheapest Intel i3, the G4900, at 67.95€, while the 200GE is 57.95€. And the G5400? They list it as 'out of stock', at more than 100€ (!)
If both where at the same price, indeed, the Intel CPU would be more interesting. But if it's either unavailable or 20-50% more than the price given in the article, what's the point?