Progress Comes in Many Forms

It's been a few weeks since my last post, and a lot of things have happened. The ongoing pandemic has continued to grind on me, and I continue to tweak my workstation and workflow to continue to get better and better at working from home, my allergies turned into a sinus infection, and I continued to struggle to learn programming. All of which continue to improve, even if just small amounts each day.

Then the world erupted. Two of my coworkers, Cameran and Arianna have already covered it better than I could ever hope to. I ask that you go read their thoughts if you haven’t already. I feel very fortunate to work at a company that takes these matters very seriously. We are a small company, and we feel every employee is essential to our success. That includes their emotional well being. Just like a family, if one person is hurting, we all stop and listen.

Back to the benchmarks. I’m sure you all are curious how the 3ds Max Benchmark is coming along. Well, good and not so good. Due to how Autodesk’s licensing works, for the time being, I’ve had to put a halt to the part of the benchmark that we would run on a customer’s computer before shipping it out. The sign-in process is complicated, and the uninstall process is very difficult. We have begun talks with Autodesk to see what options we have.

The good news is that I’ve been able to successfully run the benchmark on all of our test platforms in Labs. I’m currently in the process of sorting through the data now. Some things aren’t much of a surprise, like Threadripper is AMAZING at CPU rendering, and the 2080 Ti gives better viewport performance than the 2060.

Other things surprised me, such as loading and saving. Using a scene file that is 4GB, they all loaded in about 30 seconds, give or take a second. The exception to this is the 9900K loaded in an average of 24.6 seconds, and the 10900K averaged 26.7.

This is the average load time of multiple passes. I expected a bit more spread than we are seeing.

All of the test beds are using the same NVMe drives, so I expected the 9900K and 10900K to be faster, but then the rest of the CPUs plateaued. So either my test was flawed, or it doesn’t make much of a difference what CPU you use. A bit of research is in order.

I’m hoping to have the full article out soon detailing all the tests, so keep your eyes out for that.