AMD Processors
KeithH
Posts: 338
in The Commons
Hi -
With Iray we are stuck with the more expensive nvidia video cards. Is there any reason I should stay with the Intel CPU and not AMD?
I want to upgrade my motherboard and CPU but want to make sure all my software still works.
Thanks - Keith
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I stopped using Intel back around when windows xp was still new, mostly because of cost. Still use AMD to this day and have not had any software issues because of it.
CES 2020 starts next week. Both Intel and AMD will announce their latest CPU lineup. We'll see how Intel responds to AMD's recent success.
If price were not an issue and you got a matching Intel and AMD cpu, the overall experience will be the same. You're choice on AMD vs Intel should be on price. One benefit of AMD is that you will have more years to upgrade your CPU in the future without needing a new motherboard.
Been using a Threadripper for about 3/4 years now.
Love it.
Both AMD or Intel have been running Windows successfully for well over 20 years
There's a project proposal by Jessub Kim for the diffeomorphic plugin to import iray materials to cycles. When this will be done we'll get a perfect match and cycles could be used instead of iray.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import-daz/issues/7/convert-shader-brick-materials-from-daz
I know it is OT but I followed your link and have to say that most of the discussion is way over my head. However, I did note the mention of how it will take months. I just wonder whether, in the meantime (and for those of us with an NVidia GPU already), that NVidia and DAZ might figure a way to speed up the render process. That won't provide any hope for AMD GPU users but some of us tried to export to Blender in the hope of faster render times than IRay could manage. Unfortunately (for me, at least) I wasn't happy with the way the materials were converted so the new project is exciting in that respect. Of course, the other major reason for wanting to render in Cycles is that it support Out-of-Core so is not hamstrung by the amount of VRAM in the way that IRay is.
Just echoing what others have said here. AMD's Ryzen CPUs love rendering, and actually beat Intel's rendering numbers in a number of cases, depending on which application we are talking about.
Intel has been forced to cut their pricing to make their own products more attractive vs. the current AMD CPU lineup. In a couple of instances though, specifically Ryzen 3950X and the 3960X/3970X Threadrippers, yeah Intel is behind the curve now. These three CPUs are still in high demand, and often have price hikes associated with them, so it might pay to wait until the dust settles r.e. supply issues if one of these interests you.
If you are doing Iray rendering, and not using your CPU much for rendering purposes, a good 8 core CPU may be more than enough for your needs. But if you are doing 3Delight, yeah more cores good!
As for PCIe lane connectivity, if you are planning on multi-GPU setups and maybe doing some video edting and other forms of content creation, thats where the HEDT platforms come into play. The new TRX 40 Threadripper platforms are rather pricey, but the prices have been coming down on the previous Threadrippers, which use the X399 chipset.
If AMD made a 16 core 39xx Threadripper though, I'd be looking at that pretty hard right now, as the 3960x and 3970x are rather pricey for my needs. The x570 AM4 boards are a also a bit pricey, and since I'm planning on a multi GPU setup, say where I'd want to have 4 double spaced PCIe-16 slots, and plenty of connectivity breathing room PCIe lane wise, yeah the Threadripper boards are more 'roomy' in that regard.
In short, yeah as others have said, AMD vs Intel are about on par with each other render software wise as far as CPUs are concerned, so you shouldn't have any issues going with an AMD build. Now AMD GPUs are a completely different story of course!
Go with whatever best fits your budget, and meets your 'future expansion' needs. Daz Studio loves multi-GPU setups for Iray rendering - just look at the Iray benchmarks thread for examples of this.
..sadly Iray for Daz does not support memory pooling with the RTX GPUs (not even the Titan or Quadro series) so those extra cores come at a pretty hefty price.
Much appreciated
Not only Iray with DAZ but also do virtual / mixed reality development on the same computer. I have 32GB RAM and nice video card. I now want to upgrade my motherboard and CPU.
Thank you
AMD Ryzens have been getting excellent reviews for content creation software and most multithreaded tasks. Just look up any review roundup the past couple of years. Intel still does a little better at single threaded tasks, but the gap is getting smaller all the time.
For Iray, since you are using GPU, it really doesn't matter what the CPU is, like at all. You could seriously be using a dual core CPU with a 2080ti and not have a problem rendering Iray. The Daz app itself only uses one thread, so any CPU with a decent single thread should be fine. However, if you do run out of GPU VRAM, then having a good Ryzen is ok as a backup since Iray has a CPU fallback. But it is still way slower than a GPU. Of course, if you are doing other things besides Daz Iray, then obviously the CPU becomes more of a concern.
In general Ryzens have been a revelation. They are cheaper and each generation has seen big gains with the latest 3000 series being fantastic. One other aspect of Ryzen is that they are nicely back compatible, as the desktops all use the AM4 socket. Most of the motherboards will support them all. So you could go very cheap and buy a good motherboard with a cheap Ryzen 2000 series and then upgrade that to a big 3000 series later. AMD has not said if they will support the AM4 platform once again with the 4000 series, and they probably wont. The Threadripper 4000 series differs from the 3000 series, so desktops will probably do the same. Still, it is pretty impressive how long AMD has stuck with AM4, and if AMD does start a new AM5 then we can safely assume they will support it for a few years as well. This is in direct contrast with Intel, which seems to release a new socket for every single CPU line they make, which makes upgrading a far more expensive task. Meanwhile many people who bought the first generation Ryzen can do a BIOS update to their motherboard and upgrade to a 12 or 16 core monster, which is crazy.
Just picked up a Ryzen 7 3700x (Amazon) and MSI X570 motherboard (Newegg). I thought it was time to upgrade my I7-4770.
I din't think you understand what memory pooling on Nvidia cards is about.
On the actual subject, There are a few applications where fast single core speed is more important. Outside of games these are becoming increasingly uncommon. Professional want things done as fast as possible and that will mean multi threaded for pretty much everything.
AMD presently gives more cores for less money so I'd buy, and have bought, Ryzen. DS is one of those applications that primarily uses a single core so if DS is your only professional application then Intel might still be an option.
Just after release there was a real shortage of 3900X. I was going to (try to) buy one but the price spike by over £100. It's now back to around £450, which is pretty good for a 12 core (amazing, actually - I bought my 4 core i7 4790K for around that!). I don't think Intel are going to be able to do anything about it in 2020. Maybe 2021. They have big problems with their next generation tech.
The 3900X IS a pretty sweet CPU, and is definitely worth a look for anyone looking for a powerful and reasonably priced 12 core. The 3900X availability still has a few 'sold outs' but for the most part I've been able to spot them on sale again at or near MSRP within the next couple of weeks.
My theory is that resellers are grabbing the 3950X's, and the new 7nm Threadrippers, as fast as they can so that they can sell them at a markup. This was something we saw at the 3900X launch as well. At some point, we should see market saturation for the new chips, and the $750 MSRP should become more of a reality for the 3950X at that point.
What I'm most interested in at the moment is the new 4000 series APUs, which are sporting 8 cores. I'm guessing the desktop versions of those are still a couple of months away at best, but I'm pretty happy with my 2400G 4C/8T APU in my interim build. It's been doing destop duty while my Nvidia card is 100% dedicated to rendering. This allows me to work on other stuff while a render is baking, without the desktop slowing to a crawl, as the Vega graphics aren't useful for Iray, but work just fine for desktop and non-Iray viewport duties.
One other note. While apparently, according to a few of you on this forum, the Daz Studio software uses only a couple of threads for most tasks, as I understand a few of the plugin scripts do take advantage of mulitple cores when they are available. So if you do a lot of transforms using plugins, the extra cores might help at that point depending on the operation in question. Does DForce take advantage of multiple cores? I'm curious...
AMD's press conference at CES will be livestreamed on Monday. Guess what I'll be doing around that time...
I bought an AMD 3800X a few months ago. Its great, I guess. EVerything works. so far. It just seems, well it worked before and it works now. Not all lathered up about it. Where i see big time savings though is with the RTX 2070 Super ... renders that always took an hour or more are now at 1-2 minutes ... wow for sure.
Ryzen 9 3950X is currently around $1000 where I am, Intel Core i9 9960X which looks somewhat equivalent has dropped from about $1900 to $950 in 3 months...
Well just put an order in for my next one, I'm switching from Intel to AMD for the first time in 20yrs
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X 32 Core 64 Thread 4.5GHz
Nvidia RTX 2080 TI 11GB
64GB DDR4
So hopefully this will give me a boost mainly for terragen renders 16K 360 HDR in an hour would be good !
That's the thing... most 3d software editors (Maya, 3DS, Blender, etc.) use one or two cores only and as such benefit mostly from single core performance. That is why buying a 9900K is still best if you're just doing that. If you're CPU rendering obviously AMD blows it out of the water as it's got 4 extra cores.
However if you work in Vue, it'll use all the threads available.
I was going to order at $190 a AMD Ryzen 5 3600 with 6 cores / 12 threads with about 25% faster performance in single core mode but because I intend to buy a AMD Ryzen 9 3950X when they drop below $400 anyway I bought at $149 an AMD Ryzen 7 2700 with 8 cores / 16 threads instead. The Zen+ single thread performance isn't as good as the Zen 2 architecture though but I plan on trying to learn openCL programming a bit on a AMD Radeon RX 570 8 GB M2k OC I bought (and has went up an astounding $70 in price since then!) so having a relatively recent and fast AMD GPU with 8GB RAM was more important than maximal CPU single core performance anyway.
I'm waiting on the Ryzen 7 2700 now, everything else is here and put together already. It is supposed to be here by this Thursday.
tl;dr: Intel Pentium 1 - 120mhz.... a brief 3 years AMD Athlon, back too Intel for the remainder of the time until 2020 - money, performance, feature-set, apparent longevity and drastically faster for Gaming and 3D Rendering now with the Ryzen 7.
Switching to an AMD Ryzen 2700x is the best CPU-related decision I've made since I went to Core2Duo in a laptop many-many years back. No bias; I go where the price and performance are best, however, AMD is miles ahead - out of the box it's great; but if you take the time to install the associated chipset drivers; hopefully your motherboard is quite capable so that you can take full advantage of other factors that can have a big impact (e.g. Gen3 PCI-E... as old as it is; some don't have it OR don't set their BIOS to it). I'm using an MSI X470 Gaming Plus motherboard and I believe it has everything I could ask for.
One of the key things to do is make sure to select the AMD Ryzen BALANCED Power Configuration .. Don't be fooled by any "Ultimate" or "Maximum" configs; the Ryzen power plan is installed alongside the chipset and CPU drivers, and it's optimized to ensure the CPU works at full capacity when it needs to, and goes silent when it needs. In Bios settings, enable AMD Cool'n'Quiet, along with Smart Fan control etc.
X470 Gaming Plus Motherboard, AMD Ryzen 7 2700x and nVidia 1060 GBPS + 512gb main SSD and 1TB WD HDD with 32mbs Solid State Caching ... this replaced an i7 with a very decent but very pricey ROG Motherboard (which is a shame; the pins on the CPU seat were bent so it's essentially useless!) - I
Me, Money. Motherboards and More Momentum tl;dr i strive to make money off the money I spend
I didn't invest big, I never do - but I try to choose wisely so that I have an extremely fast computer especially given how little is spent on it. For example the previous build, and many before it, Intel based, I went in for a decent motherboard, so that I could 'top up' my GPU's whenever I was unable to run at full settings @ my monitor's maximum hz (which most of the years has been 60hz until last year; picked up the 31.5" Benq Curved 4k 120hz screen for £280, with 10% cashback ... I always use cashback and vouchers etc. so frequently things I buy pay for other things I buy - the more you do it, the more you learn the tricks. E.g I have every notable xbox and pc game for the next 3 years and the subscription cost me £86 for all 3 years thanks to a workaround. Anyway I digress -very passionate about passive income, saving money, and generating money from purchases. Sadly most of the time it falls on deaf ears .... simple systems to grant completely free money just ignored for some reason?