Hi everyone – pardon the account. My wife’s the designer and I’m the husband who works in IT.
I repurposed an old server for her a few years ago with a pair of Xeon X5650 (2.66Ghz, 6c/12t) processors in it – a total of 24 process threads. It plowed through renders but had some other issues – namely it’s a server-class system that didn’t support things like standby or audio very well. As a workstation, it wasn’t cutting it – plus, at nearly 7 years old it was getting old and throwing some other odd issues.
I rebuilt the machine on a bit of a budget this time around using an i7 7700K (4.2Ghz, 4c/8t), good price on Amazon at the time. All-around this computer is a superior workstation, however it’s HQ render times increased about four-fold. Well, I went from 24 threads to 8 threads… makes sense to me.
Today, one of my colleagues had a Dell Precision with a Xeon W-2104 (3.2Ghz, 4c/8t) in it delivered. I figured I’d try to do some benchmarking before putting it in to production.
Consider all other factors equal. NVMe SSDs, 16-48Gb RAM (anything >16Gb has no effect I can tell), GTX1060 or Quadro P2000 video cards, etc. I’m only looking at raw compute speed in HQ rendering mode. The attached is a test kitchen she whipped up real fast just as a rendering test (maybe it’s a standard demo? I donno). It only uses the default catalogs so anyone can open it.
I was completely blown away that 2020 doesn’t have a fixed resolution for rendering HQ images and instead relies on window size for this. As a side question – is there any way to specify the resolution for an HQ render before opening the HQ render screen?
For the purposes of my benchmarking, the window was simply full-screened (so very close to 1920×1200 or 1920×1080, depending on the rig). I’ve watched clock speeds and utilization levels across the systems and can confirm it really doesn’t care what video card you have in HQ render – that’s 100% CPU based. GPU is only used for the fast’n’dirty rendering done while you move your view around.
Anywho – here’s what I saw on the various platforms:
- 2x X5650: 44s
- i7 7700K: 2m53s
- W-2104: 6m48s
As best I can tell, the move to Xeon – aside from getting high thread counts – has no positive impact at all on 2020. It may even be a detriment, for some reason. All this thing cares about is the number of threads you can give it.
That said – I’ll send a beer’s worth of money to anyone out there with an 1950X Threadripper who can run this render for me and tell me how long it took. I really don’t want to plunk down another $1100 on her computer if it’s not going to be a sizeable improvement.
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