Everything related to Maxwell Render and general stuff that doesn't fit in other categories.
By feynman
#394257
Any thoughts on AMD's RYZEN 7 1800X CPU builds out yet?

€489 i7-4930K ~1000 Cinebench 15 (old CPU we use now)

€559 RYZEN 7 1800X ~1600 Cinebench 15 (what seems great value for money)

€1700,00 i7-6950X ~1800 Cinebench 15 (too costly)
By andyjacobs
#394267
As an apple user I'm watching this with Interest. My ageing Mac Pro tower has 2 x Xeon X5680 @ 3.33 GHz and 12 Cores/24 Threads. It gets a cinebench score of about 1550 which is on par with the 1800X. Given that it doesn't look like Apple will be supporting Pascal Cards in the near future, a Ryzen board with and 1080 or higher might be a good network node to render on. If they bring out a mini ITX card for Ryzen, I might even be able to fit 2 inside an old Mac Pro tower and save having an ugly PC box in the office. If apple release a new iMac with a decent CPU in it, then an Egpu via Thunderbolt 3 might be a better option.
By luis.hijarrubia
#394270
I'm watching this personally, as I'm near to build a new computer at home. The thing about Ryzen is that they have a lot of cores (8 real cores, 16 threads) for a very competitive price, but each core is slower than a i7 processor of similar price. So, if you have task that work fine with multiprocessor (like video editing, rendering...) it would be a very good option for that price, but if you need speed in a core (like videogaming), or tasks that you cannot split into several cores, maybe an i7 7700K is better option.
By andyjacobs
#394304
It will also be interesting to see where the 32 Core AMD Naples chips are priced. Dual Sockets offering 128 threads would be amazing if it was priced well below the current Xeon chips. Although once Maxwell supports multiple GPU's then adding multiple 1080's and 1080ti's might be more bang for buck.

What are your thoughts Luis? Do you think that multiple GPU's are the future or if 128 threads becomes more affordable do you think CPU's are going to be the way to go? Or would it ever be possible to have a machine with 128 threads and 2 1080's that can utilise all of that for rendering simultaneously?
By luis.hijarrubia
#394312
This is almost philosophical. We are working on multi-gpu right now. Let's see how does really work in performance. The question is more when than what. GPUs are the future of any serious computation task. But program for GPUs well done is really heavy stuff. So we still need good CPUs right now. And we are working on some CPU engine developing too. Can we in the future do hybrid rendering? Things like CPU calculating heavy paths like caustics, and GPU running very fast the rest? Sounds very interesting, not really near. Other options are having compatible engines on CPU and GPU, so we can tile the image and calculate parts of it across different devices (of any kind, CPU or GPU). And even, for batches or animations, having each device to work on a different frame at the same time. But all this are just things we have though can be done, nothing serious on the table yet, we still have a lot to do on the GPU engine, and the whole maxwell environment. We can even talk about if CPUs and GPUs are kind of being more similar, with GPUs dealing better with bifurcations than before, and CPUs having more and more cores each time.

Anyway, if really using the machine for production, I would put a good CPU, and a decent GPU (anything of the series 1000, don't need to be the latest really expensive card). Anyway, dual systems, and systems over 80 threads seems to be giving worse performance for rendering than having a network of cheaper computers working on cooperative.
By andyjacobs
#394330
Hi Luis,

Thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed response. It really helps in taking about what hardware might be suitable for adding when I upgrade.
Will there be a Maxwell Render 6 ?

Let's be realistic. What's left of NL is only milk[…]