AMD Threadripper 3990X Review: A 64-Core Multithreaded Beast Unleashed

Cinebench 3D Rendering Benchmark

The Threadripper 3990X cut through Cinebench R20 like a hot knife through warm butter. This benchmark can leverage every available thread, so all of the 64-cores / 128-threads available with the 3990X run at full tilt and the new 64-core AMD processor jumps out to a huge lead over the rest of the field. The 3990X ends up being nearly 3x faster than the Core i9-10980XE and it easily smokes the Xeon W-3175X.

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.

 

We have two POV-Ray results for the Threadripper 3990X in this test. The publicly available, current release of POV-Ray doesn't scale past 64-threads. Using that build of the benchmark, the Threadripper 3990X leads the pack, but only by a small margin because only 64-threads are employed. AMD has submitted some code to update POV-Ray to support 128-threads, however, that code hasn't been incorporated into any public releases just yet. We tested it anyway to show how the application would scale, and as you can see, there's a huge boost in performance that pushes the 3990X well out in front of all of the other processors we tested. 

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...
The Ryzen Threadripper 3990X ripped through the Blender benchmark as well, finishing up in just a hair over 46 seconds. That's nearly 50 seconds faster than Intel's fastest processor in the group, the Xeon W-3175X and almost a minute faster than the Core i9-10980XE.

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...

Memory and cache bandwidth, latency, and multi-threaded CPU throughput all have an impact on this benchmark and the Threadripper 3990X manages to pull into the lead overall, but only a small margin separates it from the Core i9-10980XE and Xeon W-3175X.