AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Review: Why Is This Amazon's Best Selling CPU?
by Dr. Ian Cutress on May 18, 2020 9:00 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
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/
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 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/
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jabber - Tuesday, May 19, 2020 - link
I just wish he's cut that damn awful hair, put it in a ponytail or use some conditioner on it at least. The constant hair tucking....aarrghghhhhhhhhhhburnte - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
I have a 3600X, not the 3600, and I can throw everything at it in 1440p. Once the perf patches came out for Fallen Order and the drivers for my RTX 2070, Fallen Order runs like butter. Shadow of the Tomb Raider never dipped below 90fps, and most of the time tops out my monitor's 144hz refresh rate, all running at 1440p.evilspoons - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
I mean, you've got 1080p and 4K results already and as the resolution goes up the CPU is less important than the GPU. 1920x1080 vs 2560x1440 vs 3840x2160, the results are basically just going to be split down the middle.PeterCollier - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
It's interesting that in Australia, the Ryzen 7, instead of the 5, is the most popular. You would think that the VAT incentives the less expensive parts. Is electricity unusually cheap down under? Or is the 7 the best selling part because winter is coming to the southern hemisphere, and users needed upgrades from Preshott?Spunjji - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
Could be that once you've saved up the silly amount of money needed for an upgrade there, stretching a little further to the 3700X just seems to make sense?PixyMisa - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
Yeah, the exchange rate is brutal right now so it makes sense to try to make your system last an extra year. I have two Ryzen 1700 systems and I'm hoping to hold onto them until DDR5 arrives.tmr3 - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
Generally speaking, Amazon isn't really *the* go-to place for PC hardware shopping in Australia. We tend to rely more on established PC-centric retailers like PCCaseGear, Scorptec, Mwave, Centre Com, PLE and a few others depending on where in Australia you live. It's worth considering that Amazon has only been available as an AU website for around 2.5 years now, and depending on where you look, stock for certain products is often spottily available, way overpriced through third-party sellers only, or clearly international stock being sold as a "local" listing.On one of those retailer sites (Scorptec in this case) that has the option to list products by popularity, of the AM4 processors, the Ryzen 5 3600 takes top spot, followed by the Ryzen 5 1600 AF, the Ryzen 7 3700X, and then the Ryzen 9 3900X and Ryzen 5 2600. For their Intel processor listings, the Core i7-9700K is followed by two "value bundles" featuring the Core i5-9400 and Core i3-8100, then it's the Core i7-9700F and the Core i9-9900K. Unfortunately, they don't offer a combined view so we can't compare overall popularity.
Gigaplex - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
Australian winter isn't that cold. I think the Amazon ranking is skewed because we generally shop elsewhere.boozed - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
Heard of the Core i9?ingwe - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
Wow these are good results for AMD. Looks like this might have to be my next build.