I’m entertaining the idea of setting up some headless computers as dedicated Unreal Swarm agents. However, I’m uncertain on which hardware would be most appropriate.
Regarding the CPU, I understand that Intel’s range has superior IPC performance (in addition to decreased power consumption and better featured motherboard chipsets), which dominates AMD’s range in tasks that utilise less than four threads. However, in tasks that utilise more than four threads (such as rendering), AMD’s range tends to perform slightly better (at least, when comparing the AMD FX 8320 $199 AUD] to the Intel Core I5 4460 $255]) and is better value for money. Would I be correct in assuming that the AMD FX 8320 would be the most appropriate choice (since Unreal Swarm appears to have no thread limit)?
Regarding the LAN, how much data is sent between the agents and the coordinator? Would a 100Mbit network be sufficient, or would a 1Gbit network be required?
From those specific processors it looks like the AMD does better, but if you looked on ebay or something you could probably get cheaper. On the Passmark website the prices aren’t quite right for everything so it’d be hard to tell what the values are actually.
I’d definitely comparing 2 builds before going all in and building several computers with one processor, maybe try finding someone with those processors and comparing light map bakes speeds? But purely from price and other benchmarks, AMD does seem like the better choice on paper. Have you also figured in electricity and cooling costs though?
For building the lighting you will likely get better performance with a higher number of cores (each core = 2 threads if the CPU uses HyperThreading, however the 2 CPU’s you mentioned are not Hyper-Threaded). Obviously performance per core will have an impact, but a slightly slower 8 core processor will likely give you better performance than an Intel 4 core.
For this reason I would go with AMD. I personally prefer Intel CPU’s since they tend to have better per core performance, and if you can afford it I would consider looking into Xeon’s with 8+ cores. But between the AMD and the Intel you listed above for a swarm build server, you will likely get more out of the AMD.
More cores would not necessarily give you more speed, that’s part of the problem with AMD because they have processors with lots of cores but they individually don’t compare to Intel processors even at the same clock speed. And a lot of them don’t have a very high clock speed anyway.
Still in that comparison the AMD one would be faster, but that’s a lower end Intel processor.