Metashape Pro 1.7.2: CPU Performance Roundup

Introduction

Intel's 12th Gen Core desktop processors launched toward the end of 2021, as did Windows 11, making this a great time to do a roundup looking at CPU performance in Agisoft Metashape across a wide range of different processor lines. How does Intel's new Core i9 12900K stack up against AMD's Ryzen 5000 Series, Threadripper, and Threadripper Pro chips – as well as Intel's own 11th Gen Core, Xeon W, and Core X Series?

For this article, we are looking at samples from multiple Intel and AMD processor families – both current and some older models that have performed well in the past. The focus is on photogrammetry processing in Metashape Pro, for which we have developed internal benchmarks here in our lab. More info about those tools and how we use them are available in the Test Methodology section.

Test Setup

Listed below are the specifications of the systems we used for our testing:

Test Methodology

To test each processor, we used our in-house Metashape benchmark – both the standard and extended versions. Each was run twice per CPU, and the best results were included in the charts below. Here is some basic info about the image sets in these projects:

• Rock Model – 36 photos at 20 megapixels each
• School Map – 51 photos at 18 megapixels each
• School Model – 439 photos at 18 megapixels each
• Park Map – 792 photos at 18 megapixels each

We make these benchmarks publicly available under the Creative Commons BY-ND license, so if you use Metashape Professional (or get the 30-day trial) you can download them from our website and compare your system's performance with the results shown here. We used version 1.7.2, which is no longer the latest version – but is the most recent we have verified to work correctly with our benchmark.

Benchmark Results

There are a lot of processors in this round-up, so to help a little we have colored Intel models in blue and AMD in green. Results are listed from fastest at the top to slowest at the bottom and split up by image set.

We have also compiled all of our results into a chart, for those interested in more fine-grain details:

Analysis

Intel's new Core i9 12900K gave top performance in all four of our Metashape benchmark image sets – completely unseating the former champion, AMD's Ryzen 5000 Series. It is worth noting that this doesn't take into account the option of disabling Hyperthreading or SMT, which we have found to improve performance in Metashape on some CPUs, but from the numbers it looks like the 12900K would keep its lead even if processor settings like that were tweaked in the BIOS.

Both Intel and AMD's higher core count chips came in a lot slower, which has always been an oddity of Metashape in our tests. It really seems like there is a sweet spot around the 8-16 thread range where this application performs the best, and then having the highest per-thread speeds becomes the biggest factor after that. The only downside with the lower core count CPUs that give optimal performance in Metashape is that they tend to be limited to 128GB of system memory, which could be a bottleneck with extremely large projects.

What is the best CPU for Metashape?

Intel's Core i9 12900K is the fastest CPU we've seen yet for processing both models and maps in Agisoft Metashape Pro. No other processor we tested could beat it in any of our four benchmark image sets, though AMD's Ryzen 5000 Series isn't too far behind.