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  1. Home
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  5. V-Ray: Intel X-series Refresh CPU Rendering Performance

V-Ray: Intel X-series Refresh CPU Rendering Performance

Posted on November 13, 2018 by William George
Always look at the date when you read an article. Some of the content in this article is most likely out of date, as it was written on November 13, 2018. For newer information, see V-Ray: Intel X-series Refresh CPU Rendering Performance

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • Test Setup
  • Benchmark Results
  • Analysis
  • Conclusion

Introduction

V-Ray, from Chaos Group, is a widely used rendering engine for creating realistic 3D graphics. It includes two versions: one for rendering entirely on the CPU and the other for rendering on NVIDIA GPUs. The GPU version mostly depends on how many of which video cards are in a given workstation, with little regard for other system specs, but the CPU version is heavily impacted by both the processor's clock speed and core count.

Chaos Group also publishes a benchmark utility for V-Ray, which can test both CPU and GPU performance. This is a fantastic utility for comparing different processors and video cards, though a bit dated, and we run it here at Puget Systems on every workstation we build. We also run it on new and upcoming hardware in Labs, to see how well various components should perform with V-Ray rendering.

Intel just refreshed their Core X Series processors, giving them a small bump in clock speed and increasing the PCI-E lane count on the lowest end model. CPU based rendering tends to favor high core count processors, but clock speed is also a factor, so we are going to compare these new CPUs against their predecessors as well as other models from both Intel and AMD.

9th Gen Intel Core X i9 and i7 Processors

Test Setup

To create a comprehensive comparison, we included Intel's previous generation of Core X processors – specifically, those which match the new chips in core count and price – as well as Intel's mainstream 9th Gen Core series, AMD Ryzen, and AMD Threadripper models.

All of the CPUs were run through the free V-Ray Benchmark utility, in CPU mode. If you would like more details about the full hardware configurations involved in these tests, click here to expand the following section.

Testing Hardware
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z370
AORUS Gaming 5
Gigabyte X470
AORUS Gaming 7 WiFi
Gigabyte X299
Designare EX
MSI MEG
X399 Creation
CPU: Intel Core i7 9700K 8 Core
3.6GHz (4.9GHz Turbo)

Intel Core i9 9900K 8 Core
3.6GHz (5.0GHz Turbo)

AMD Ryzen 2700X 8 Core
3.7GHz (4.3GHz Turbo)

Intel Core i7 7820X 8 Core
3.6GHz (4.5GHz Turbo)

Intel Core i9 7900X 10 Core
3.3GHz (4.5GHz Turbo)

Intel Core i9 7980XE 18 Core
2.6GHz (4.4GHz Turbo)

Intel Core i7 9800X 8 Core
3.8GHz (4.5GHz Turbo)

Intel Core i9 9900X 10 Core
3.5GHz (4.5GHz Turbo)

Intel Core i9 9980XE 18 Core
3.0GHz (4.5GHz Turbo)
AMD TR 2950X 16 Core
3.5GHz (4.4GHz Turbo)

AMD TR 2990X 32 Core
3.0GHz (4.2GHz Turbo)
RAM: 4x Crucial DDR4-2666 16GB (64GB total) 8x Crucial DDR4-2666 16GB (128GB total)
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB or NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 8GB (GPU irrelevant for this test)
Drive: Samsung 960 Pro M.2 PCI-E x4 NVMe SSD
OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
Software: V-Ray Benchmark 1.0.8

Benchmark Results

Here are the render times, in seconds, for the various processors we tested in V-Ray Benchmark 1.0.8 – with AMD models in red and Intel in blue. The new Core X Series chips are shown in a darker blue, to make it easier to spot them in the lineup:

V-Ray CPU Benchmark 1.0.8 Intel Core X Series Refresh Versus Intel 9th Gen Core, Older Core X, and AMD Ryzen / Threadripper Processors

In addition, we broke out these results into three smaller graphs to make it easier to look at the isolated performance of similar CPUs:

V-Ray CPU Benchmark 1.0.8 Comparison of 8-Core Processors

Comparison of 8-core processors

V-Ray CPU Benchmark 1.0.8 Comparison of $900 - 1000 Processors

Comparison of processors in the
$900 – 1000 price range

V-Ray CPU Benchmark 1.0.8 Comparison of $1800 - 2000 Processors

Comparison of processors in the
$1800 – 2000 price range

Analysis

In both the high-end and mid-range price brackets, these new Intel processors surpass their predecessors but fall far short of AMD's Threadripper models. Intel will have to do something more substantial in future generations if they want to close that gap or pull ahead.

Interestingly, when looking at the more affordable 8-core processors, neither these new Intel chips nor AMD's Ryzen performed well. Instead, Intel's more mainstream Core i9 9900K took the crown – thanks to much higher clock speeds, while retaining Hyperthreading (which the i7 9700K lacks, hence its lower performance). None of this is very impressive, though, since all of these chips take about two and a half to three times longer to render in V-Ray than AMD's top-end 2990WX.

Conclusion

This processor refresh brings small performance improvements over the previous models, but nothing groundbreaking. Fixes for some of the exploits discovered in recent years are also nice, but those were mostly issues that threatened servers rather than workstations.

For CPU rendering, AMD's Threadripper processors are still the best choice for pure speed and in terms of price:performance ratio.

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Tags: 9700K, 9800X, 9900K, 9900X, 9980XE, AMD, Chaos, Coffee Lake, Core, CPU, Group, i7, i9, Intel, Performance, Processor, Refresh, Rendering, Ryzen, Skylake X, Threadripper, V-Ray

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