“Mac or PC?” – the age-old question among computer enthusiasts. How fast are Apple and PC workstations when rendering in V-Ray? And which offers a better value?

“Mac or PC?” – the age-old question among computer enthusiasts. How fast are Apple and PC workstations when rendering in V-Ray? And which offers a better value?
“Mac or PC?” – the age-old question among computer enthusiasts. How do Apple and PC workstations compare for content creation and rendering in Cinema 4D?
Intel has launched their new Xeon Scalable processor series, with very high core counts when used in dual CPU configurations. How do they stack up to single-socket workstations using other Intel and AMD processors in Cinema 4D?
PhotoScan makes heavy use of the central processor (CPU) in a computer to run many of the calculations involved in turning still images into a 3D model or map. Different steps in that process utilize the CPU in various ways, though, so we are looking at how several Intel and AMD processors compare in this application.
PhotoScan makes use of both the CPU and GPUs (video cards) in a computer, during different steps of the photogrammetry workflow. One of the configuration options within this program also allows the CPU to be utilized during steps that are primarily performed on the GPU – and it is enabled by default. However, we have found in our testing that this option usually hampers performance more than it helps!
PhotoScan is a photogrammetry program: an application that takes a set of images and combines them to create a 3D model. A combination of CPU and GPU processing is used in this process. It has been a couple years (and several version updates) since we last tested PhotoScan, so we are revisiting it to see what has changed and how it performs on modern computer hardware.
Dassault Systemes launched the initial version of SOLIDWORKS 2018 (SP0.1) late last year, but with the recent release of SP1 we expect that customers will soon be using it in production environments. In preparation for that, we have tested the field of current Intel Core i7 and i9 processors to see how they stack up in SW 2018. We hadn’t yet had a chance to test AMD’s Threadripper processors in SOLIDWORKS either, so they are also included in this round of benchmarks.
Pix4D is an advanced photogrammetry application, suited to wide range of uses, with a focus on handling images captured by drone cameras. Processing of those images into point clouds and 3D meshes / textures is time consuming, so we have tested multiple projects across a wide range of CPUs to see what hardware performs the best.
The latest Core processors from Intel have launched: the 8th generation of this series, code named “Coffee Lake”. This brings with it the first six-core CPUs in Intel’s mainstream processor line, so we are taking a look at how they perform in Solidworks 2017. For comparison, we also have results from our previous recommendation for modeling and CAD: the Core i7 7700K “Kaby Lake” chip.
We’ve previously tested the new Hybrid Mode in V-Ray RT 3.6, which combines CPUs and GPUs in order to speed up rendering, on Intel’s Skylake X processors. This time around we are going to test on AMD’s Threadripper 1950X, and use even more powerful GPUs than before. We also take a look at GeForce GTX 1080 Ti vs Titan Xp performance.