The AMD 3rd Gen Ryzen Deep Dive Review: 3700X and 3900X Raising The Bar
by Andrei Frumusanu & Gavin Bonshor on July 7, 2019 9:00 AM EST** = Old results marked were performed with the original BIOS & boost behaviour as published on 7/7.
Benchmarking Performance: CPU 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
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’.
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/
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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RSAUser - Thursday, July 11, 2019 - link
Well, tests of the new AMD card show near no difference for PCIe 4, so no point yet.0ldman79 - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
I'm not done yet, but you guys have done an excellent job so far.The only differences I can spot are just in how both of you phrase things, quality is excellent as always.
JustinTeim - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Andrei, What is the status of ECC support for these CPUs ?Yorgos - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
He is not even a Dr., to start with.Ian Cutress - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
DPhil awarded from Oxford in Computation Chemistry in 2011. (Oxford call it a DPhil, but it is the old term for a Ph.D.)mikato - Thursday, July 11, 2019 - link
I read that as Dr Phil at first. So to be clear, you do not have a Dr Phil degree. I’m not sure what that would be, but I know it would be terrible.XsjadoKoncept - Sunday, July 21, 2019 - link
You'd probably have to be friends with Oprah. Yeck.WaltC - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Hope all is well for the good Dr. Cutress!Oxford Guy - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Yes, like all the results that include the performance regressions on Intel from actually dealing with reality.Reality is that they exist and need to be patched, not ignored.
That includes turning off hyperthreading.
cheshirster - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
"Dr Ian Cutress as he unfortunately the timing didn’t work out"I bet he just don't want to risk his reputation.