The AMD 2nd Gen Ryzen Deep Dive: The 2700X, 2700, 2600X, and 2600 Tested
by Ian Cutress on April 19, 2018 9:00 AM ESTCPU Rendering Tests
Rendering tests are a long-time favorite of reviewers and benchmarkers, as the code used by rendering packages is usually highly optimized to squeeze every little bit of performance out. Sometimes rendering programs end up being heavily memory dependent as well - when you have that many threads flying about with a ton of data, having low latency memory can be key to everything. Here we take a few of the usual rendering packages under Windows 10, as well as a few new interesting benchmarks.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Corona 1.3: link
Corona is a standalone package designed to assist software like 3ds Max and Maya with photorealism via ray tracing. It's simple - shoot rays, get pixels. OK, it's more complicated than that, but the benchmark renders a fixed scene six times and offers results in terms of time and rays per second. The official benchmark tables list user submitted results in terms of time, however I feel rays per second is a better metric (in general, scores where higher is better seem to be easier to explain anyway). Corona likes to pile on the threads, so the results end up being very staggered based on thread count.
Blender 2.78: link
For a render that has been around for what seems like ages, Blender is still a highly popular tool. We managed to wrap up a standard workload into the February 5 nightly build of Blender and measure the time it takes to render the first frame of the scene. Being one of the bigger open source tools out there, it means both AMD and Intel work actively to help improve the codebase, for better or for worse on their own/each other's microarchitecture.
This is one multi-threaded test where the 8-core Skylake-based Intel processor wins against the new AMD Ryzen 7 2700X; the variable threaded nature of Blender means that the mesh architecture and memory bandwidth work well here. On a price/parity comparison, the Ryzen 7 2700X easily takes the win from the top performers. Users with the Core i7-6700K are being easily beaten by the Ryzen 5 2600.
LuxMark v3.1: Link
As a synthetic, LuxMark might come across as somewhat arbitrary as a renderer, given that it's mainly used to test GPUs, but it does offer both an OpenCL and a standard C++ mode. In this instance, aside from seeing the comparison in each coding mode for cores and IPC, we also get to see the difference in performance moving from a C++ based code-stack to an OpenCL one with a CPU as the main host.
POV-Ray 3.7.1b4: link
Another regular benchmark in most suites, POV-Ray is another ray-tracer but has been around for many years. It just so happens that during the run up to AMD's Ryzen launch, the code base started to get active again with developers making changes to the code and pushing out updates. Our version and benchmarking started just before that was happening, but given time we will see where the POV-Ray code ends up and adjust in due course.
Cinebench R15: link
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.
Intel is still the single thread champion in benchmarks like CineBench, but it would appear that the Ryzen 7 2700X is now taking the lead in the multithreaded test.
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Marlin1975 - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Looks good, guess AMD will replace my Intel system next.Just waiting for GPU and memory prices to fall.
3DoubleD - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Agreed... the waiting continuesWorldWithoutMadness - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Lol, you might even wait until Zen 2 comes out next year or even later.Dragonstongue - Thursday, April 26, 2018 - link
should be out next year as AMD has been very much on the ball with Ryzen launches more or less to the DAY they claimed would launch which is very nice...basically what they are promising for product delivery they are doing what they say IMO, not to mention TSMC recently announced volume production of their 7nm, so that likely means GloFo will be very soon to follow, and AMD can use TSMC just the same :)t.s - Tuesday, July 31, 2018 - link
What @WWM want to say is: You can wait forever for the RAM price to go down, rather than when ryzen 2 out.StevoLincolnite - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
I still haven't felt limited by my old 3930K yet.Can't wait to see what Zen 2 brings and how Intel counters that.
mapesdhs - Friday, April 20, 2018 - link
If you ever do fancy a bit more oomph in the meantime (and assuming IPC is less important than threaded performance, eg. HandBrake is more important than PDF loading), a decent temporary sideways step for X79 is a XEON E5-2697 v2 (IB-EP). An oc'd 3930K is quicker for single-threaded of course, but for multithreaded the XEON does very well, easily beating an oc'd 3930K, and the XEON has native PCIe 3.0 so no need to bother with the not entirely stable forced NVIDIA tool. See my results (for FireFox, set Page Style to No Style in the View menu):http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/misc/tests-jj.txt
mapesdhs - Monday, April 23, 2018 - link
Correction, I meant the 2680 v2.Samus - Friday, April 20, 2018 - link
I never felt limited by my i5-4670k either, especially mildly overclocked to 4.0GHz.Until I build a new PC around the same old components because the MSI Z97 motherboard (thanks MSI) failed (it was 4 years old but still...) so I picked up a new i3-8350k + ASRock Z270 at Microcenter bundled together for $200 a month ago, and it's a joke how much faster it is than my old i5.
First off, it's noticeably faster, at STOCK, than the max stable overclock I could get on my old i5. Granted I replaced the RAM too, but still 16GB, now PC4-2400 instead of PC3-2133. Doubt it makes a huge difference.
Where things are noticeably faster comes down to boot times, app launches and gaming. All of this is on the same Intel SSD730 480GB SATA3 I've had for years. I didn't even do a fresh install, I just dropped it in and let Windows 10 rebuild the HAL, and reactivated with my product key.
Even on paper, the 8th gen i3's are faster than previous gen i5's. The i3 stock is still faster than the 4th gen i5 mildly overclocked.
I wish I waited. It's compelling (although more expensive) to build an AMD Ryzen 2 now. It really wasn't before, but now that performance is slightly better and prices are slightly lower, it would be worth the gamble.
gglaw - Saturday, April 21, 2018 - link
i think there's something wrong with your old Haswell setup if the difference is that noticeable. I have every generation of Intel I7 or I5 except Coffee Lake running in 2 rooms attached to each other, and I can't even notice a significant difference from my SANDY 2600k system with a SATA 850 Evo Pro sitting literally right next to my Kaby I7 with a 960 EVO NVMe SSD. I want to convince myself how much better the newer one is, but it just isn't. And this is 5 generations apart for the CPU's/mobos and using one of the fastest SSD's ever made compared to a SATA drive, although about the fastest SATA drive there is. Coffee Lake is faster than Kaby but so tiny between the equivalent I7 to I7, I can't see myself noticing a major difference.In the same room across from these 2 is my first Ryzen build, the 1800X also with an 960 EVO SSD. Again, I can barely convince myself it's a different system than the Sandy 2600k with SATA SSD. I have your exact Haswell I5 too, and it feels fast as hell still. Especially for app launches and gaming. The only time I notice major differences between these systems is when I'm encoding videos or running synthetic benchmarks. Just for the thrill of a new flagship release I just ordered the 2700X too and it'll be sitting next to the 1800X for another side by side experience. It'll be fun to setup but I'm pretty convinced I won't be able to tell the 2 systems apart when not benchmarking.