RealityCapture 1.1: AMD Ryzen 5000 Series Performance

Introduction

AMD's latest mainstream processor family, the Ryzen 5000 Series, has launched with direct upgrades to several (but not all) of their most popular Ryzen 3rd Gen chips. These new models cover from 6 to 16 cores, and utilize the updated Zen 3 microarchitecture which brings substantial improvements to instructions per clock (IPC). Even though core counts and cache sizes are not increasing, the overall performance of these new CPUs is dramatically faster than both previous generations and competing processor designs.

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For this article, we are looking at how the new AMD Ryzen 5000 Series processors compare to a host of other currently-available models: AMD's previous Ryzen 3000 Series, their high-end desktop (HEDT) Threadrippers, and both Intel's mainstream Core and HEDT Core X lines. The focus of this article is on photogrammetry processing in RealityCapture, for which we have developed internal benchmarks here in our lab. Details about those tools and how we use them are available in the Test Methodology section.

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Test Setup

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

*Pre-launch BIOS only has AGESA 1.0.8, but AMD says AGESA 1.1.0 should come soon – which may further improve performance

Test Methodology

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

• Rock Model – 45 photos at 20 megapixels each
• School Map – 51 photos at 18 megapixels each
• School Model – 278 photos at 18 megapixels each
• Park Map – 758 photos at 18 megapixels each

We make these benchmarks publicly available under the Creative Commons BY-ND license, so if you use RealityCapture you can download them from our website and compare your system's performance with the results shown here.

Benchmark Results

There are a lot of processors in this round-up, so we are color-coding the results to make them easier to sift through:

• Light red with glow = New AMD Ryzen 5000 Series processors
• Light red (without glow) = Older AMD Ryzen 3rd Gen models
• Dark red = AMD HEDT Threadripper 3rd Gen CPUs
• Light blue = Intel mainstream Core 10th Gen processors
• Dark blue = Intel HEDT Core X 10000 Series CPUs

Results are listed from fastest to slowest (top to bottom), and split up by image set.

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Analysis

AMD has certainly delivered on the promise of a dramatic increase in performance with the Ryzen 5000 Series. Compared to the models they are replacing, these CPUs are each 10-15% faster in RealityCapture. That is a solid boost, especially considering that they are a drop-in upgrade for most current Ryzen 3000 Series users, and the performance is coming from per-core improvements rather than simply throwing more cores at the problem.

In fact, it looks like just throwing more cores at this application wouldn't be all that helpful. These new Ryzen chips outperform the much higher core count Threadripper models. Similarly, Intel's Core X processors fall far behind the more affordable Core lineup – and neither can match the new Ryzen 5000 Series. One model comes close: the Core i9 10900K trades blows with the Ryzen 7 5800X, but AMD's offering is less expensive and still managed to beat Intel in 3 out of 4 of our image sets. Considering that there are two Ryzen models which are even faster yet (the 5900X and 5950X) I would say AMD is the overall winner here by a fair margin.

Are AMD’s Ryzen 5000 Series Processors Good for RealityCapture?

Unequivocally yes! AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X is the fastest CPU we have tested yet in RealityCapture, and the 5900X and 5800X are both close behind. The only limitation I can see to this platform is the maximum of 128GB with regards to memory support. That is not likely to be an issue in RealityCapture, but if it is a problem for anyone then I would advise moving to AMD's Threadripper processors as the next closest option in terms of performance.

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