Ryzen - I wish I were doing a build right now
Jim_1831252
Posts: 728
For a while I considered making a new intel build with an i7 6900K for rendering with Lightwave, but when I priced it all I decided that was really out of my price range for the time being. That was before Ryen. When I first heard the first rumours of how good they were shaping up to be I was pretty skeptical. The FX line of processors was completely disillusioning, but now that I've finally gone and checked out a bunch of benchmarks I'm completely blown away.
I did a write up for DigiSprawl, collecting a bunch of benchmark sources (hardware is one of those things I love), and now I'm dreaming about new rigs again. Maybe I could swing a 1080X... It's still less than half the price of that 6900K. I currently have a i7 4770 I bought a few years ago to replace a fried i7 860. Maybe I should sit on my hands and go for a GTX 1080ti.
Anyone got any Ryzen stories to share?
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I skipped a step in upgrading from your description so I don't know what having a 4770 is like. I put a Ryzen 5 1600 machine together after using an i7 920 for 8 years. Overclocking the R5 1600 to 3.75 ghz took a few hours. I did get it up to 3.9 ghz but didn't want to keep the voltage that high. A better motherboard or faster RAM may have helped push the speed up and voltage down. I bought the most inexpensive B350 MOBO. I don't see myself adding a second gtx 1070 which would require an x370. At 3.75 ghz and ddr4 2400 RAM it benchmarks on geekbench at 20,000. Super happy. At 3.9 ghz I got 21,250 on geekbench. My old computer benched at around 7,500.
I am able to render in the viewport while adjusting lighting in real time. Like making art. Huge upgrade for me so I am really happy.
Waiting for all the parts was the hardest thing. But it gave me time to watch computer building videos and read my hardware literature since it was a first time build. All total building a computer saved me about 50% off a store bought computer. I could find sales and rebates which shaved off another 125 dollars from my parts list. The Ryzen 5 1600 is awesome. I can easily render with my gpu and multitask other activities at the same time. Anyone wanting to get a new computer I would suggest building your own. I would not have been able to afford a gtx 1070 otherwise.
I just put my new rig together:
Ryzen 1800X
AsRock X370 Taichi
G.Skill Trident Z RGB 16GB DDR4 3200MHz
I had some faulty memory issues and then crashes (weirdly the problem were the Windows updates, without them the system was unstable).
Thankfully it all works like a charm now.
Except DAZ Studio. The performance there is very poor. The viewport is more laggy than it was on my old PC (i7-4790K).
Render times shouldn't change, since it's all GPU, but that viewport is concerning.
Have you changed the Viewport Optimisation settings in Edit>Prefrences>Interface to Best? By default Ds usse the safest, but worst, setting - in most cases Better is fine, and in many cass Best works.
Wow, this actually helped alot. Thank you very much, mate, I owe you a beer.
What's this option anyway and why isn't it on by default?
The doesn't change much the Ryzen situation with DAZ tho', I haven't touched those settings on my old PC, so the performance isn't better because of this.
p.s. I just checked and it seems changing this to Best or Better had much more prominent effect on the Ryzen machine. There is an improvement on the old rig, but it's smaller. Could the GPU play some role here? My new rig runs Titan Xp and 980Ti, while the old one has 580.
I'm glad to see new AMD builds. @ Ongoing Moment sounds like you have yourself a good DAZ Studio and gaming build, if you game at all. The 1600 sounds like a great chip for GPU rendering focused machines, while still packing a pretty hefty punch.
@ nevarran I was reading that many video games will require specific optimisations to run better on the new AMD processors. Maybe that issue extends beyond games. Luckily DAZ already had a solution there for you. A lot of people have been reporting issues with a slugish Studio interface. Maybe they all have Ryzen chips.
I'm looking at secondhand GTX 980ti now. I don't know what the prices are like in US, but on ebay Australia they are currently less than half their original price. This is how I ended up with my two current GTX 780ti cards. So very, very tempting.
We have about a week to go until Computex 2017. AMD, Intel and NVidia will be showcasing new products there, with new products scheduled to enter the supply chain in the following weeks.
I bring this up because once the new products are fully launched, we may see some reductions in prices for some of the older products, so there may be some good deals to be had by waiting on the sidelines for a few weeks.
Threadripper intrigues me a lot, but as the guy above mentioned, Ryzen 5 has really been impressing a number of people (as far as price vs performance goes), as well as Ryzen 7. Threadripper has to be one of the coolest CPU names I've seen in a while, but I'm more interested to see how well the various software programs are able to take advantage of 16 cores/32 threads, especially on the rendering side.
The theory/hope that I've read from a number of enthusiasts is that Threadripper will cost about twice as much as Ryzen 7, which would put it in the $1000 range. No idea how much the X390/X399 motherboards will be. AMD may shoot for a higher MSRP though, we'll see. Pricing it around $1000 would put it at about the same price as an I7-6900, or double the cores for the same price. My guess is that the games that the 4 core 7700k will still outperform Threadripper in thegames/apps that favor single threaded/in benches that the 7700k is already winning, but that Threadripper will own the benchmarks that Ryzen is excelling in already. Threadripper does have four memory channels, and although that is usually worth only a few percentage points (2 channel vs 4) in benchmarks, those few percentage points may put Threadripper over the top in a few instances, seeing that the benchmarks are so neck in neck already. Of course, if Threadripper ends up at a lower frequency than Ryzen 7, they may lose some of those potential gains.
Of course, Intel could decide to cut their margins a bit to make themselves more attractive vs. Ryzen, but thus far it looks like they haven't done any significant price reductions. With the i9's entering the pipeline soon, it'll be interesting to see what happens there.
Looking forward to the reading the tech sites next week to hear about all the new toys in action!
I have a 1800X. It's awesome. You won't regret it. I'm now looking forward to seeing what the Threadripper 16 core can do. And yeah, Computex is coming up. Looking forward to Vega. I want to replace my R9 290. I have another card for iRay.
Threadripper, huh, that sounds pretty impressive. I'll be keeping an eye out for that. I wonder if Intel will move their prices... On the one hand Ryzen is great, but on the other hand AMD has been loosing market share for years, so perhaps it'll take more than this to get Intel making serious adjustments.
Oh, here's a question for you Ryzen adoptees: what OS are you guys running? I hear that AMD isn't supporting Windows 7, but there is zero chance I am going to move my work rig to running that. It's like a really annoying fawning parent that thinks you can't do anything for yourself.
Changed to Windows 10. Doesn't seem to be an issue yet.
It is actually Microsoft that is not supporting Ryzen on anything but Windows 10. I think there is also an Intel platform they are also not supporting with Windows 7. You can get a patch for Windows 7 from AMD/Motherboard company that lets you use Windows 7. Not sure about how or if Microsoft is issuing updates though.
Yes, the GPU is important - this is a setting that controls, as I understand it, how much advantage DS takes of GPU acceleration features when drawing the viewport. It'ss et to a conservative value (more work done by the CPU) for safety, so that if there's an issue people don't find DS very unstable on installation, but can usually be upped on reasonably current hardware.
The performance in games seems weird, indeed. I tested with two games:
NieR Automata runs perfectly.
While Rise of the Tomb Raider is veery janky - it runs very fast, yet every now and then it would almost freeze, with the monitor even blinking. Something is not right there.
So far optimization seems to be the problem with both games and software.
@Richard Haseltine, I noticed that this acceleration makes the camera movement fast and fluid, but posing the characters is still laggy. Is that normal, or my rig is acting weird?
Posing involves a lot more calculation - especially if your figure is wearing hair or clothing with a smoothing modifier, or has SubD applied - which is handled by the CPU.
Ah, so if the acceleration is carried by the GPU and stuff like SubD by the CPU then Ryzen (or at least mine) works very poorly with DAZ Studio :(
Honestly, if there wasn't a rumor for a new processors from Intel, I would've purchased an i7 and shoved the Ryzen back in the box, until further optimization.
Never ran said "Ah, so if the acceleration is carried by the GPU and stuff like SubD by the CPU then Ryzen (or at least mine) works very poorly with DAZ Studio :("
Did you try overclocking your cpu? I studied the Ryzen 5 a lot and saw a huge benchmark change between base settings and overclocked. Up to 20-25% performance boost depending on how much is applied. On geekbench a stock 3.2 ghz was getting 16,000 benches but overclocked cpu's were hitting 19,500 to 21,000. Same with userbenchmarks. My stock Ryzen 1600 was in the middle of the road but once I pushed it to 3.75 ghz it bounced up to the 88th percentile in performance. A huge jump.I was torn when choosing between kaby lake and ryzen. I ended up going with a i5 7500, was nervous trusting an AMD build, as I have never had one. Only noticed a few things it does a lot faster than my old i5 2500 really, but it uses way less power, so that is a plus too.
The thing is, the CPU shows pretty good results in benchmarks. But in practice there are all those optimization issues.
Like I mentioned, my DAZ Studo works very bad with the Ryzen. Even a 20% boost won't change that.
Sorry to hear about the DAZ3D issues. My Ryzen 5 1600 works as advertised. One last point of thought. As I have read software makers are having to rethink and tinker with the coding to take advantage of the multithreading technology of the Ryzen chips. It seems that the way to write code for the Ryzen chips is different than the way to program instructions to an Intel chip. After learning how the AMD Ryzen infinity process works the software (gaming) makers augmented thier code and improved performance. This may take awhile before software is fully compatible with Ryzen in terms of using all the available resources it has to offer.
For me it was a cost decision. To get 6 cores and 12 threads for less than 200 dollars was a no brainer. More cores will be the future and software just has to catch up. I am sure DAZ3D with fix stuff under the hood to use all your cores and threads to the highest degree.
Best of luck to you Nevarran
Mo cores = mo good. Except when it came to the last generation of AMD processors. Glad to hear that they will work on Win 7. What I read suggested AMD was backign Microsoft by not providing support directly for Win 7.
I am saving up to buy a Ryzen 1600, a B350 mb and 16 gigs of memory. I presently have an AMD FX-8120 and the Ryzen 1600 benchmarks almost
twice as fast as my 8120, the DDR4 memory should improve this even more. The 1600 gives you the best bang for the buck, next best is the 1700. There really
is no good reason to buy the 1600x or 1800x, As the 1600 and 1700 can overclock to within .1 ghz of the x's. I have used AMD for years with no problems.
Cinebench 15 score for the 1600 was 800, my 8120 does 422. My upgrade should cost less than $450.00.
So yours works well with DAZ Studio? No laggy posing and whatnot?
I thought that the higher threaded processors might be slower in DAZ Studio's interface. It's like in Lightwave, it has long been demonstrated that using the 32-bit Modeler and having hyperthreading disabled is more efficient than using the 64-bit version with hyperthreading. Most programs simply aren't designed to efficiently use multiple cores, so the more cores a processor has, the less efficient traditional programs become. Thankfully rendering is one area where the benefits of multi-core processing are well exploited.
edited for hundreds of typos. System is sluggish with both GPUs running hot.
I disabled the SMT (Ryzen's hyperthreading), but didn't notice any improvement. I tried on the 64bit DAZ tho', don't know if the 32bit will be any different.
I also overclocked the CPU - easily reached 4GHz, and the RAM at 3200. But the improvement in DAZ Studio is insignificant.
Reached 1735 on Cinebench, whatever that means. On default ([email protected] and RAM@2133) it was ~1600.
Cinebench really only indicates performance for heavy mult-core tasks. Not a bad score at all. 1600 seems to be what they bench at stock, so that's a fairly good overclock. Try the single threaded Cinebench test, not that it'll make your Studio performance better.
Rather than disabling SMT all together, you could try setting the afinity in the task manager.
Open Task Manager
Press "More Details"
Go to the "Details" tab
Right click on "DAZStudio.exe"
Select "Set Affinity"
Uncheck "<All Processors>"
Place check marks in all of the even number CPUs "0, 2, 4, ...."
Press "OK"
That will keep Studio from using the secondary threads on each core.
That's a good tip. Thanks James. I want to benchmark that with some physics sim.
I did the thing James suggested, but again I see no improvement. It actually seems to perform worse.
I noticed something else in HWMonitor: DAZ Studio almost never uses more than 6 threads. And when I pose a character it would use only 4.
(and those threads are used at about 30-40% max, the whole CPU at 7-9%)
While Photoshop or ZBrush, for example, would use all 16.
You should have a better score on Cinebench. Ryzen is known to have better performance with higher memory speed. If your memory runs at 2133 that may be one factor to improve as it seem to run underclocked. I don't know if you can tweak that with your motherboard Nevermind I just saw you also overclocked to run the memory at 3200
Also get Windows 10 anniversary update if you don't have it and update to latest Nvidia drivers as well as AMD's latest chipset driver
You may have performance problem because of Windows 10 and/or Daz Studio because Ryzen is shiny new. It is too soon for them to be optimized for Ryzen.
I personnaly plan to build an AMD Rig soon. I was waiting for Threadripper. I think that AMD deserves some support as they have made a good job. I'll certainly begin to use Windows 10 with that new PC...and return to Win 7 if not happy
Daz Studio itself doesn't use all cores. Iray rendering and Dyamic cloth sim in Studio will use everything you let it use.