In the process of preparing a new system build for TG/3D I'm kind of on the fence about whether to wait for Ryzen 3950X or the later to be released Threadripper with 32 cores.
I'm well aware that a lot of software is not capable of fully utilizing that many cores, but that differs for each piece of software.
I'd like to ask a favor to all owners of systems with 16 physical cores or more (preferably!) to perform a scalability test for TG using the Terragen 4 benchmark scene.
I have to think about how valuable and insightful it is to also perform SMT/hyperthreading for these core-counts, but for now I think those are more relevant to CPU testing than software testing and I'd like to keep things as simple as possible to begin with.
I'd like to plot render times for rendering with 4, 8, 12, 16, 24, 28 and 32 physical cores. If such systems are available and people feel up to it of course!
You can do this by changing the max threads number to the same numbers as above, but please do not render with more threads than cores available in your system (see above).
As usual with benchmark testing, don't change anything else.
It would be great if around 8 people would manage to do this, so I can plot average and standard deviations.
Please report CPU build and clock speeds, although they are not critical since I know how to normalize this kind of data, thanks to my dayjob in a lab.
However, you never know with Intel/AMD's differences, so it might be useful in the end.
Constructing such a curve would be very informative for people considering to build a hefty render machine, but who still want to hit the sweet spot for price/performance.
At some point more cores are not helpful anymore and a potential waste of money.
I'm shooting for a system with 4 or 8 more cores than TG can handle so I can still do other relatively demanding tasks while rendering with optimal thread number.
Thanks in advance for people who are willing to invest time - I know I ask for quite a bit of your time!!- in helping me with this and I'm happy to hear any discussion on this endeavour!
Cheers,
Martin