AMD Ryzen 7 3700X & Ryzen 9 3900X Workstation Performance

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

As some point in the near-future, Dimension is going to gain GPU support, explicitly targeting NVIDIA’s RTX technologies. We look forward to testing that out, but for now, we only have CPU-only performance to pore over, and thankfully, we’re seeing largely expected scaling. The 3900X does manage to keep super-close to the 9980XE, though, more than we would have guessed before diving into this performance look.

And yet again, we see the 8-core 3700X leaping ahead of the 2700X. It’s not enough to make anyone owning a 2700X to feel truly compelled for an upgrade, but it’s a nice treat for those who’ve waited this long to pull the trigger on a ~$329 CPU. Admittedly, it might be owners of the 2950X who are suddenly going to be scratching their heads, because the 3900X beats it once again here.

Cinema 4D & Cinebench

The Candies project is simpler than Interior, and it kind of shows when we’re seeing the scaling get changing up a bit from each one. The Candies project saw both of AMD’s and Intel’s current top dogs match each other, whereas the 3900X sat in the third slot, again ahead of the last-gen 16-core 2950X. And, in continuing a new tradition, the 3700X is proving itself to be a lot more than a clock boost.

Scaling matches our expectations a bit better with the interior project, and that even includes with the 16-core 2950X, which manages to win its continued bout with the 3900X. So, what about the Cinebench benchmark?

We’ve seen the 3900X match the 2950X a number of times in the review so far, and now Cinebench agrees with us. We’re looking at a 12-core that’s as fast as last-gen’s 16-core in some cases. That’s downright impressive when we’re usually only seeing 5-10% gains gen-over-gen.

On the single-thread side of things, AMD’s 3900X soars to the top, beating out even the 5GHz Intel Core i9-9900K. That seems a bit unrealistic given all we’ve known of Intel, but it could be that recent security mitigations are not helping here.

Corona Renderer

The performance of the 3900X yet again keeps up to the 2950X, which we’re still trying to wrap our heads around. We could understand it if the 12-core came close, but not expect it to actually exceed it. This really bodes good things for next-gen Threadripper, which is expected to reduce hiccups caused by Zen 1’s design, but most notably on its many-core Threadrippers.

POV-Ray

AMD’s 8-core 3700X saw a 17% multi-thread improvement over the 2700X in Cinebench, but that’s a gain reduced to about 10% in POV-Ray. Another interesting change is with the single-threaded performance here. While AMD won the battle in Cinebench, the scaling returns back to where we’d expect it in POV-Ray. Let’s be real: it’s hard to compete with a 5GHz Turbo clock.