Blender 2.79 Performance On Various Intel/AMD CPUs From Ryzen To EPYC

Given the release of a new Blender "Barbershop" benchmark file, I decided to test this new scene plus the other benchmark files with Blender 2.79 on a variety of Intel/AMD CPUs for some fresh results of how various newer CPUs compare for this open-source 3D modeling software.

This weekend I took a variety of systems running Ubuntu Linux and ran tests via the Phoronix Test Suite of Blender 2.79 with the BMW, Classroom, Fishy Cat, Barbershop, and Pabellon Barcelona scenes to see how their performance compares from desktop CPUs to AMD Threadripper and EPYC setups. The CPUs I had available for this quick comparison included the Core i7 6800K, Core i7 8700K, Core i8 7960X, Core i9 7980XE, Xeon Silver 4108, dual Xeon Gold 6138 CPUs on the Intel side. On the AMD side was the Ryzen 7 1700, Ryzen 7 1800X, Threadripper 1950X, and AMD EPYC 7601. All the Blender rendering was done on the CPUs; a fresh GPU comparison will be coming up soon.

First up was the BMW27 scene.

The dual Xeon Gold 6138 setup was the fastest to little surprise considering it has 80 logical cores in total while the EPYC 7601 tops out at 64. Worth noting with these numbers though is the Threadripper 1950X competing very well with the Core i9 7960X, which costs much more than this current top-end Threadripper CPU. The Ryzen 7 1800X manages to beat out the Core i7 8700K Coffee Lake CPU in this scene.

And then next was the Classroom scene:

The Classroom scene with Blender 2.79 shows similar positioning of the processors but takes much longer to run.