The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review: 24 and 32 Cores on 7nm
by Dr. Ian Cutress, Andrei Frumusanu & Gavin Bonshor on November 25, 2019 9:05 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
Being fully multithreaded, we see the order here follow core counts. That is except for the 32-core 2990WX sitting behind the 24-core 3960X, which goes to show how much extra performance is in the new TR generation.
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/
We have new Threadripper records, with the 3970X almost getting to a minute to compute. Intel's nearest takes almost as long, but does only cost half as much. Again, the 3960X puts the 2990WX in its place.
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.
In our test, we run the simple ‘Ball’ scene. 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’.
Our LuxMark test again pushes both TR3 processors out in the lead.
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/
More rendering, more wins for AMD. More losses for the 2990WX, even though on these tests it still beats the 10980XE quite easily.
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plonk420 - Monday, November 25, 2019 - link
it may be small, but they're now fighting Intel in that same small market with these Threadrippers, and, well AMD has the winning product in use cases i'm looking at (simultaneous video encoding streams and Blender, with enough cores to do that while gaming).AV1 is currently so slow to encode, i have to split a movie into 8 parts (probably more with one of these Zen2 TRs to get it done quicker) for a doable encode. took about 41-48 hours per part save for the credits to encode at 720p on a 16c32t 1950X
DavyJones - Monday, November 25, 2019 - link
AMD curbstomps Intel at every price point, from $50 all the way to $7000+. How much lower should AMD price their CPU's exactly? Should they give them away for free?And yes, Intel has a vastly larger marketshare. They were on top for well over a decade, & for a large portion of that, AMD was completely irrelevant. Their server marketshare was statistically insignificant just 3 years ago & now they're knocking on the door of 10%. Their stock has skyrocketed in that time. Again... How cheap should AMD go when they have an objectively superior product?
jabber - Tuesday, November 26, 2019 - link
Indeed at the end of the day Dell and HP etc. are taking all the i3/i5 chips the Corporate market can buy.Intel are probably still outselling AMD 10 to 1?
maxxbot - Tuesday, November 26, 2019 - link
I would absolutely bet that more of these TR3 are going to be sold to professionals than consumers, I waited in line for the 3950X yesterday and even for that part half of the people in line were buying it for work.Teckk - Monday, November 25, 2019 - link
In this segment could be, but in laptops Intel is what is selling. AMD needs Zen2 + 7nm thereTEAMSWITCHER - Monday, November 25, 2019 - link
That's my issue... I can't find any of these Threadripper, Ryzen 3950X, or Cascade Lake X in stock anywhere. But I can order 16" MacBook Pro right now and have it here tomorrow. Desktop CPU's are OLD SCHOOL. I would rather have a mobile solution that I can take .. anywhere.Korguz - Monday, November 25, 2019 - link
must be just where you are.. i can go to one store and buy the Threadripper 3960X now, but the 3970x is special order, for the intel 10xx series, not showing anything for these, yetimaheadcase - Monday, November 25, 2019 - link
Did Csutcliff not even look at benchmarks or even look at price difference for a setup?tygrus - Tuesday, November 26, 2019 - link
News of Intel's death have been greatly exaggerated. It would take more than 20 years of bad performance (<20% market share) for Intel to burn it's cash reserves.Oliseo - Tuesday, November 26, 2019 - link
I've seen bigger companies fail faster.