My thoughts right now is that i dont need a GPU like a 1080ti that costs £700 because instead i could have a 16 core thread-ripper, and just use my old video card for the viewport. This way i can have performance in all applications and rendering ( i like to use MB3D and Ultra fractal) and i wont have to worry so much about memory limits, plus the system will be massively upgradeable for RAM in the future. I could start with 32GB and potentially expand to 128GB or more…
So im wondering just how far behind a GPU can a 32 thread fast efficient cpu like this be. Theres even a possibility i could afford a 24 core EPYC, that has a list price of just over £1000. Again i wont need an expensive GPU… and the upgradeablity will be high.
The 1080Ti will probably be faster in some simpler scenes, slower in more complex ones. If you have nothing to do for the GPU otherwise, focusing on CPU is probably better.
Having said that, Threadripper isn’t on the market and hasn’t been benchmarked yet and the whole system will cost you about twice as much as a 1080Ti GPU. You can also have more than one GPU in a system, or render with CPU+GPU (in separate blender instances). I wouldn’t look at it as “either or”.
Yea, i guess so, depending on budget or amount one is willing to spend… I totally overlooked that you could run separate instances. Would it work to ask the system to use GPU to render frames 100-200 in one instance, and the cpu to render frames 0-100 in another instance? Or maybe have the cpu render volumetric lighting on one render layer and then the GPU to render the other layers in another instance…? sounds a good idea.
With exception to rendering and a very few other areas, most of 3d workflow is singlethreaded. It means when you try to simulate cloth in Blender, wait for a modifiers or do sculpting, all your cores except 1-2 will be idle. Also for rendering GPU will wipe the floor with it especially in scenes that beginner works with (e.g a character, not a scene from movie). As BeerBaron often states in other threads, it’s better to have less but more capable cores than many slow ones. Here’s a good chart to base your investment on: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html
I’d personally get 300-350$ cpu based on the chart and 1070 or 1060 for similar pricerange to a threadripper system.
@cgstrive, Hi.
I also thought that poor performance of some CPU in Blender depended only on Single thread performance, but you see here what I asked, and now I’m not sure what other things influence on performance:
Edit:
PassMark results seem to be more in line with what I’m seeing on Blender. I do not know why there are so many sites on the Internet that put Ryzen’s Single Thread performance higher than intel CPUs.