AMD Threadripper 3970X And 3960X Review: Multi-Threaded Domination


Ryzen Threadripper 3970X & 3960X - Cinebench, POV-Ray, Blender, Fluid Dynamics

Cinebench rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation tool suite used by animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of system processor resources and can utilize any number of threads, which make is an excellent gauge of computational throughput. This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders and animates 3D scenes and tracks the length of the entire process. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graphs below.

Cinebench
3D Rendering Benchmark

cinebench

No, your eyes aren't deceiving you. What you're seeing here in the Cinebench R20 benchmark are the new 3rd Gen Ryzen Threadripper dominating Intel's flagship HEDT processor, the Core i9-10980XE, in both the single and multi-threaded tests. The Threadripper 3960X outpaced the 10980XE by a whopping 55.8% and the 3970X put up a jaw-dropping 93.7% higher score.
POV-Ray Performance
Ray Tracing Benchmark

POV-Ray, or the Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer, is an open source tool for creating realistically lit images. We tested with POV-Ray's standard 'one-CPU' and 'all-CPU' benchmarking tools on all of our test machines and recorded the scores reported for each. Results are measured in pixels-per-second throughput; higher scores equate to better performance.

pov ray 

Our results in the POV-Ray benchmark mirror what we saw in Cinebench R20. The new 3rd Gen Ryzen Threadripper perform well in the single-threaded test and simply crush everything else in the multi-threaded test, by a wide margin. The 24-core Threadripper 3960X is even able to outrun the 32-core 2nd Gen Threadripper 2990WX.

Blender
3D Rendering Benchmark

Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that can handle everything from modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. It has a built-in benchmarking tool that will track the time it takes to complete rendering a particular model. We used a CPU-focused BMW model for these tests here...

blender
The 24-core Threadripper 3960X couldn't outrun the 2990WX in the Blender benchmark, but the 32-core Threadripper 3970X sure did. And both outperformed the Core i9-10980XE by wide margins.  With rendering workloads that will whack all of the cores / threads in a many-core processor, the new 3rd Gen Ryzen Threadrippers are simply in a league of their own.

STARS Euler3d
Computational Fluid Dynamics

STARS Euler3d is a computational fluid dynamics benchmark which uses a CFD grid that contains 1.23 million tetrahedral elements and 223 thousand nodes. The benchmark executable advances a mach 0.50 Advisory Group for Aerospace Research, or AGARD, flow solution for an aeroelastic test wing. The benchmark score is reported as a CFD cycle frequency in Hertz.

This benchmark is multi-threaded, but is also dependent on platform bandwidth, and cache and memory latency, so the final results are not determined by compute performance alone. Cache sizes and memory bandwidth affect the score as well...

euler

Memory and cache bandwidth, latency, and multi-threaded CPU throughput all play a role in this benchmark and the workload favors Intel's architecture. As such, the Core i9-10980XE takes the pole position, but the new 3rd Gen Threadrippers aren't too far behind and they show a massive improvement over the previous generation.

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