Upgrading from Hex to Hex, what can I expect from this CPU upgrade?

[aaronmontero]

Hello! I work as a visualizer for a furniture company and have recently hit a bit of a rendering wall, with increasing quality demands coupled with unchanged time frames. As a result, we're now looking at getting some hardware and software upgrades. I currently render mostly interior/product stills and render with V-Ray Adv 2.2, but will soon be using V-Ray 3 as well.

 

I am currently working with a 6-core Xeon W3680 3.33Ghz and will soon be upgrading to another 6-core Xeon E5-1650 v2 at 3.50Ghz (Similar to the 4930K).

 

My current cpu has a 9,274 Passmark score, and the E5 got 12,467. I understand this score isn't exactly about raytracing or about multithreaded applications. Benchwell numbers show a variety of results for these processors as well (though my current one only has a Benchwell V2 score, not V3), but it's approximately 25% higher on the newer E5.

 

Though the plan is to keep the W3680 as a dedicated node, I would like to know what kind of performance improvement I could expect from the workstation processor upgrade alone?

 

Thanks in advance!

[jasonstewart]

I recently built a node with a FX 8350 and my workstation has a 4930k. Through the few rendering tests I have ran I would say that it is relatively close to the Passmark numbers so I think it would be in the neighborhood of 30% faster. Since they are both Xeon chips I would think it would be a more "fair" comparison than a AMD vs I7 and my I7 is overclocked as well. The main benefit IMO will be adding the node.

[Dimitris Tolios]

You will probably see a notable performance boost with the newer Core architecture the E5 will bring to the table.

It won't blow your mind away, but it will be there - depending on the software used, it might be significant.

[aaronmontero]

Thank you Jason and Dimitris. Seems like the older chip was decent in its time, but I'm surely looking forward to the upgrade and the capability for DR.

 

By the way, I've read some people mention that so-and-so workstation or processor would allow for one to handle scenes of n number of polygons. Where could I read about such guidelines?

Edited September 10, 2014 by aaronmontero