I think I asked a question similar a couple of years ago, but of course time moves on.
I’m thinking of getting a new PC which will have to be a do it all workhorse, general office stuff, software development, one or two games (I play very little) and Blender work. Out of all this the Blender part of the equation is the most important.
At the moment I have a 3770 processor and 2 GTX780’s, rendering is pretty slow but I have a couple of laptops that can share the animation work, the main problem is the viewport which get’s very choppy when working with a lot of geometry. Where is the viewport work done? I’m assuming it’s all processor?
Are there any benefits in going to Xeon processors for blender, or will I not see any benefit?
I will have to compromise on the final build as there are a limited number of motherboards that support dual chips and have space for 3 or 4 GPU’s that don’t cost the earth.
Any and all opinions and or suggestions would be appreciated.
Unless you’re doing CPU rendering the general consensus seems to be go for fewer, faster cores, rather than more slower cores.
Many workloads in blender are still single threaded so you’ll see better performance on those with say a 6700/7700k than your average xeon SKU.
If you’re set on piles of cores however I’d suggest something from the HEDT lineup rather than the xeon line. That way at least you can OC the chip and get respectable single threaded performance out of it.
As I understand it the issue with viewport is much more about optimisation than it is hardware - in that high poly count objects kill it because of the way the software is currently designed. Apparently this should be seeing some improvement in the next major blender release.
Another thing to consider is the upcoming release of AMD’s Ryzen SKU’s. Even if you don’t want to go there you could likely save some cash by waiting for the Intel price drops that should follow.
Hmm, all very valid. It will be a while before I’ve got the cash together. The most interesting here is a viewport overhaul. I will wait to see what’s revealed.