Threadripper vs Volta. New computer considerations

Mendoman

Hello all,

I've been thinking to upgrade my current machine, and I've been reading recent rumours about upcoming products, but I'm still not quite sure what's the best solution for me yet. My current machine is i7-4790K 4GHz and Titan Xm. I do play games, but mostly strategy and stuff like that, so my current GPU and CPU are more than enought to run Crusader Kings 2 just fine. It's only about rendering and simulation speeds I'm interested about. My original plan was to upgrade my old titan with new volta titan when it's released, but I got really interested about those upcoming 16-core threadripper processors when I saw that they could much much cheaper than Intel 10+ multicores. Interwebs speculate that it might sell as low as 1000$, so compared to Intel's counterparts it would be a steal. With new motherboard, cooling and stuff, I'll probably end up paying around 1500$. That's about the same ball park as new Titan Xv ( or however they choose to name it ), since I doubt Nvidia is really going to decrease their prices despite increased competition...actually I fear the opposite.

 

Threadripper is apparently released in the summer/Q3 and there's lots of rumours that new NVidia GPUs might also be released around Q3 this year ( it might be some upgraded Pascal cards or the new Volta ), so it's a big chance they both arrive about the same time. With new architecture, this new titan still might be totally worthless for Iray rendering. If Pascal fiasco repeats, it could be 6 months before NVidia gets drivers up to date and DAZ incorporates it to DS, so it's a big risk to take for $1000+ GPU. If I buy new CPU, that "should" work out of the box, but since I haven't done any CPU rendering for a long time, I'm still wondering how fast 32-thread CPU rendering really could be, and does DS use all the cores/threads available? I assume, that 16-core processor would give a huge boost for Real Flow, Blender simulations and all the other processor heavy applications that I also use. So what do you guys think, old titan + 16-core processor or titan volta + old processor? Unfortunately buying both new toys is out of my budget.

nonesuch00

I'd wait til January for either but I'd watch the prices around 'Black Friday' after Thanksgiving and Christmas shopping season. That'll be a lot of money either way probably.

JamesJAB

Daz studio itself does not as far as I can tell.  

Iray and Optitex Dynamic Cloth on the other hand will use everything you let it use.
When I have CPU+GPU enabled in Iray, it maxes all 16 threads on my dual quad core Xeon setup.
Cloth simulations max out all 16 threads too

AlienRenders

I thought Volta was Q1 or Q2 2018. Computex is coming up. Will likely have more info then on both Threadripper and Volta (as well as Vega from AMD).

iRay will use all the cores, but a CPU, even a 16 core 32 thread one, will not match a nVidia video card. It takes something like 18 minutes to render the benchmark scene (from another thread) on a R7 1800X. It takes 3 minutes on Titan X Maxwell. So twice the cores would still be 9 minutes. Probably more since the clock speed will be lower on that many cores.

Mendoman

Thank you for replies, and it's a shame CPU rendering apparently still hasn't improved that much. I was hoping I could hit 2 flies with 1 stone, by just upgrading CPU.

When it comes to Volta release, it's all just speculation. Lots of sites just predict that NVidia will release something new at Q3, but nobody's really sure what. New pascal cards, or maybe Volta. I read rumours about pascal 20xx cards, but who knows? Whatever it is, I think we can thank AMD for finally giving some competition, by making quality cards with reasonable prices and NVidia now has to respond. It's same for Intel. Vega and Threadripper are great wake-up calls for those giants 

kyoto kid

...the first Volta release will be a Tesla compute card.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/nvidia-tesla-v100-gpu-details/