I love Blender and I love stats so I figured why not crunch some of the benchmark data from https://opendata.blender.org/ and see what fun things fall out.
Please note, these stats are taken from people running the benchmark tool who are most likely to be benchmarking their new computers. For this reason, you can probably view the graphs as ‘what people are currently buying’.
There is a 6 month gap in the data in 2018 for some reason. I wonder why?
If you’re just interested in the big CPU and GPU render time comparisons, jump to the bottom!
What versions of Blender were used in the benchmarks?
Wow, 2.79 feels like it was so long ago. The benchmark tool has been on 2.93.1 for a while now. I’m sure the move to 3.0.0 is complicated and will take a while longer.
CPU Core Count
It feels like we were stuck on 4-core CPUs for many years until AMD blasted Intel with their new generation of processors. It’s good to finally see CPUs with 8+ cores taking over.
Speaking of AMD vs Intel, how is that battle going?
CPU Popularity: AMD vs Intel vs Apple
AMD’s CPUs are definitely more popular, but not by much! Apple’s M1s have made an appearance too.
How about in the world of GPUs?
GPU Popularity: Nvidia vs AMD
I guess it comes as no surprise just how much Nvidia are dominating here.
If we split it up between OpenCL (AMD) and Optix/CUDA(Nvidia) we can see why.
So much Optix! I guess that means everyone’s buying RTX cards. Let’s take a closer look at the Nvidia cards being benchmarked.
GPU Popularity: Nvidia Overview
The RTX cards have definitely been a big hit. Especially the RTX 3000 series. I wonder how different this graph would look if the cards hadn’t been in such short supply for the past year. Let’s break it down a little further.
GPU Popularity: Nvidia Detailed Breakdown
It’s surprising to see how evenly spread the 3060, 3070, 3080 and 3090 are given their different price points. The popularity of the 3090 cards especially says a lot about the Blender community and the level of GPU power that a lot of people out there need.
What do things look like from the AMD side?
GPU Popularity: AMD Overview
I don’t really know a lot about AMD’s GPUs, but the RX 6000 series are definitely the most popular here lately.
Finally, let’s take a detailed look at the GPU and CPU render times.
First let’s see the GPU charts. For the sake of simplicity I’ve averaged out the render times across all the different scenes to come up with a single number. It’s probably not the most accurate approach, but it gives a reasonable way to compare cards. I’ve also removed any CUDA benchmarks for RTX cards so they only show the Optix results. This gives a much better view of their performance.
GPU Comparison: Render Time
Unsurprisingly Nvidia dominates the top 10 spots. It never ceases to amaze me just how far we’ve come in just 2 GPU generations. I can see why the RTX 3000 series is so popular.
CPU Comparison: Render Time
AMD’s Threadrippers show just how quickly 32 and 64-core CPUs can tear through renders. In spite of that, even the 64-core 3rd gen Threadripper wouldn’t make it into the top 10 chart of the GPUs, though it gets close. Don’t forget to take advantage of CPU+GPU rendering if you don’t already!
Well that’s it. I hope you’ve had as much fun looking at graphs as I had making them!