I am in the early process of upgrading my machine to speed up my production. However, I have a big dilemma with buying the CPU. I’m not sure whether to go for the higher core count Ryzen 1700 or higher clock speed Intel CPU. 8700K
My goal is to build a long lasting setup. I will be developing and playing (mostly developing) VR titles. I will be doing a lot of light baking and programming. Occasionally I will also render videos (once a month maybe). Is Unity enhanced by a higher core count? Does it have much of an effect on light baking? I know higher core count plays a lot of role when developing for UE (light baking, code compiling).
As far as budget goes…no Threadripper or 79xx series. And let’s take out the argument of “supporting the underdog”.
Unity scales well when baking light etc. I’m on a 1800x and it bakes light much, much faster than my old 3770k
The singel core performance is not that great but its ok.
It looks like OTOY will bring GPU light baking to Unity soon so maybe a good GPU will also be helpful.
*Unity’s new Job compiler will open the way to harnessing the power of multi-core chips.
On the face of it the 8700k has the upper hand, even with less cores, it is faster at the moment however I think in the future more cores will be utilised by games and apps* so the future power of the 1700 might shine.
Another thing to consider is the lifetime of the platform e.g. will the AM4 motherboard last longer than the LGA1151?
Or what about high performance HD tech e.g. M2 / Optane these features and components can give you a massive file performance boost.
That’s just the refresh though. Zen 2 is expected to be 7nm.
That said both the refresh and the second generation will use the exact same socket as the first generation. Worst case if you end up needing to replace the processor with one of the future models you can still use the motherboard and memory you’ve purchased for the current one.
Whereas Intel will have changed their socket at least once.
Yes, I have thought about it. The downside for this option is the wait time. And even though I’m not in that much of a hurry, having promises that some kind of a product (without concrete specifications) is going to be released at a certain time period, is too uncertain for my tastes.
I like the idea about getting a cheaper CPU currently and upgrading whenever possible. I could simply sell the one I would currently buy.
I really hope the new architecture boosts clock speeds by default, as it improves the overall desktop usage performance and smoothness (which is a big plus for my pov).
Haha, yeah you could be right or they could survive a year or two without upgrading it. Who knows…When choosing AMD I thought about going for ASUS B350-F motherboard. So it should last long enough and support any future CPU updates.
It’s probably just the early issues Ryzen motherboards had with memory compatibility (something you should watch for) combined with articles on higher speed 4266 DDR4 appearing for Intel 8’th gen CPUs (link below).
I still cant get all that sweet 3200 mhz out of my G.Skill. Im stuck at 2933 mhz. And I have B-die memories. Not happt with my Asus Rog C6H mobo. They are still on AGESA 1.0.0.6 for example
Just remember there is a point where you start seeing severe diminishing returns.
Ryzen, for example, starts seeing them at approximately 2933/3066 speeds. Up to that point can bring a good boost to performance (partially because Ryzen’s internal buses are directly linked to memory speeds), but benchmarks show far smaller increases (single digit percentage) once you go beyond that.
Short answer… more cores is going to be beneficial. I’m on an Intel at the moment (6850k - 6 Core) with 64 gigs of ram. The lightmap backer will chew up all cores and it’s heavily threaded. If you’re going to be doing any kind of baking and this is specifically for Unity development, I’d say go more cores all day long.
One potential problem with some of the motherboards I checked out for Ryzen and this is a bit in line with your statement about DRAM advantages, is that their Qualified Vendor Lists only guarantee for up to two sticks of memory running at high speeds. My motherboard, for example, only guarantees four sticks if they run at 2666.
It’s entirely possible the QVLs are simply out of date though and this isn’t a problem any longer.
Probably depends on what you’re doing. I certainly don’t think 8 GB is too little if Unity is all you have open. Yesterday I had Unity, Blender, Fuse, Chrome, and Edge all open at once and everything was perfectly fine, and I have 16 GB (DDR3, can’t remember the speed).
And all the talk about baking…are people trying to bake WHILE they’re working, or are they leaving baking for an overnight thing? If you’re leaving it for an overnight thing, sure faster is better, but it’s really not that important if you’re not actively working at that moment. It’s only if you’re trying to do it during your working hours that it would become a bottleneck.
And I have B-die memories. Not happt with my Asus Rog C6H mobo. They are still on AGESA 1.0.0.6 for example