CPU for Architectural and Design Visualization - lighting build

Development Architectural and Design Visualization
1

Hi all… I realise this has been discussed elsewhere in the forums but I never seem to get a conclusive answer. Maybe that’s because there isn’t one, but here goes anyway:

I am pricing up a new PC build but I am really stuck on which CPU to go with.

I can afford (just about) a build that features either a Threadripper 1950x or Core i9 7920X.

Obviously the TR is far better value for money and you get more cores but crucially has anyone any advice on how effective all the power of these CPUs translate to lighting build times?

Is it worth getting more cores with the TR or do Intel processors still get a boost with lighting builds because of the Embree optimisation. Building lighting is the bottleneck I am hoping to resolve and get a definitive answer by people who build lighting a lot (you guys).

Thanks in advance for any info or suggestions.

2

This is the only benchmark I’ve ever seen for UE4 baking comparing Thread Ripper to the i9, but there is no 1950x in the testing.

Still going off the results and making educated assumptions, if you halved the bake time of the Infiltrator Demo 1700x, the 7900X is still faster (and so would be the 7920X)

Also remember that lightmass does sometimes get hung up on waiting for one object to finish baking, and in those instances, throwing more cores wont increase render times. You can easily tell if this is the case by watching the baking graph seeing when threads stop.

3

Thanks for the reply. Yeah that’s the only benchmark I’ve seen too. I really can’t decide between the 2. I’ll happily sacrifice 4 cores if there’s some advantage to having an overclocked i9 or an Intel chip over AMD because of the slight Embree performace issue apparent with AMD chips… although those benchmarked with Ryzen 7’s and not TR.

4

The difference between Thread Ripper and Ryzen isn’t much besides core counts, the single core performance is basically the same, 8 core to 16 core performance scales pretty much x2 in multithreaded benchmarks.

5

This thread has a few benchmarks: Intel i7 6800k or AMD Ryzen 7 1800X - General Discussion - Unreal Engine Forums
AMD examples there perform better than pugetsystems would suggest, but still don’t match the Intel chips. Also no examples of how either AMD/Intel perform on 2133 or 2400 RAM.

6

Thanks both… I’ve gone for the i9 but the 9700X because honestly, the jump in price to the 9720X just didn’t seem worth it and the 9700X has a higher clock frequency