AMD Ryzen 5 3600X & Ryzen 5 3400G CPU Performance Review

We covered a handful of major renderers on the previous page, but we’re not done yet. On this page, we’re going to take a look at a few more, including some industry mainstays and newbies. Adobe’s Dimension is the newest renderer to our testing fleet, which yet again joins Corona Renderer, which joined the fun about a year ago.

To give you an opportunity to test your own hardware against ours, we’re also including the ever-popular Cinebench standalone benchmark, which represents current R20 performance. This test, along with the latest version of POV-Ray, act as our only single-threaded angles in the article. For good measure, the performance on this page will be capped off the real Cinema 4D, to see how it agrees with CB.

Adobe Dimension

We’re beginning this page with similar performance scaling as seen on the previous pages, with cores mattering a lot more than clock speeds here. We’d imagine that if Intel’s 28-core part were more customer-friendly, it’d go toe-to-toe with the 2990WX well here. Alas, we say that at a time when we know more Threadrippers are en route, and AMD is pretty core-happy, so we could see a fabled 64-core part for real at some point.

It’s funny to talk of such many-core chips when looking at the bottom G chips, though. It’s almost unfair to look at these chips in this kind of context, because even the six-core models will easily obliterate their performance. Again, though, half of the appeal of an APU is its inclusion of graphics, so you win and lose battles with the G series depending on what you’re after. It’s interesting to think of how a 6- or 8-core APU would fare in tests like these, especially if the IGP could be engaged a little bit.

Cinema 4D & Cinebench

Again proving that not all workloads are built alike, we see varying scaling between these two tested projects, but neither to a real significant degree anywhere. In the simpler Candies test, the 18-core Intel chip keeps right up to the 32-core chip. In the same test, the 8700K pulls ahead of the 3600X, but the roles reverse in the Interior scene.

With Cinema 4D R21 having been released a couple of weeks ago, we’re investigating upgrading to it for our next suite revision, which is coming soon.

Of course, Cinema 4D has a standalone benchmark that represents its overall performance fairly accurately, so let’s see how placements fare there:

Because we’ve already tested multi-threaded performance with our real-world renders, it’s arguably the single-threaded test in Cinebench that’s most interesting here. No one is rendering to a single core, but this test does give us a bit of insight into which processors are faster at quick single-threaded tasks. Normally, Intel easily dominates this particular chart, but that was until AMD’s Zen 2 came into the picture and spiced things up.

One thing both of these Cinebench graphs highlight is that the G chips are definitely not going to offer much breathing-room at the bottom end, making them better-suited for more basic or HTPC-type use. It’s hard to ignore the differences seen from a chip like the 3600X to 3400G – a full 20% drop. Granted, this is only a single test, so it can only be weighed so heavily.

Corona Renderer

If AMD’s Zen 2 chips didn’t exist, it’d be so much easier for Intel to shine. In this test, and many other rendering tests, the 8-core 3700X beats out the 9900K and the 6-core 3600X beats out the 8700K. That said, the last comparison is quite close, so it seems certain that the 9700K would at least match the performance of the 3600X in this test.

POV-Ray

As a bit of a second opinion to Cinebench, we use POV-Ray for a more neutral (as far as we know) look at rendering. The scaling here aligns a lot more to our expectations, with the single-threaded tests putting Intel on top, but multi-threaded doing the same for AMD. It’s interesting that in the single-threaded test, even the huge Threadrippers outscore the quad-core APUs. Just imagine if the 3400G was built around Zen 2. We really want to see that chip yesterday.