Light Building Benchmark

[Raghu]

@webeindustry;610731

Some of these comments are ridiculous. There’s nothing crappy about a Xeon whatsover. You can’t overclock a quadcore to get remotely close to a 12 core + rig. You can’t even take a 4.5Ghz i7-6950x and expect it to compete on the same field as a dual socket 64 logical core Xeon rig.

I’m also interested in a standard benchmark and may end up making my own so we can have some objective measurements to work with. I was having issues using swarm agent to get more than 8 cores for lightmass and a production build was over half an hour. Now that the farm is rocking in full swing, my build time is less than 2 minutes. Try to do that within the same power envelope with a bunch of i7’s networked together. It’s just not happening.

Guess I don’t have to mention they are all rack-mounted at my residence and ready to roll-out to the datacenter for remote operation once my business gets going. i7s make cheap workstations, but they are no substitute for the real thing.

I totally agree with webindustry. My new workstation with dual Xeons ( 24 Logical with 48 Cores) is way too fast (almost 8 times) then my other two PCs with i7 5930K combined. In my opinion, if you are doing commercial works in UE4 - Going for Xeon is the most logical choice (with few projects, you can easily recover the cost). Lightmass is totally CPU based so other hardware does not affect the rendering performance. Go for as much RAM as possible.

On the other hand, if you are only starting with lightmass and UE4, going with a i7 processor is safest way (either 6 core or 8), so you can at least test few scenes and settings in UE4 without waiting for days to complete the light build. Calling a machine with i7 a workstation, is a misnomer.