[dragontamer]

It takes roughly 20-minutes to make a SINGLE good frame using Cycles on Blender. Cycles is a raytracer for 3d modeling.

If you are making a 30-second animation at 24-frames-per-second, that would be 720 frames, or roughly 240 hours (10 days) of rendering. 30-seconds would be roughly the length of a standard commercial.

If you have a computer that is 2x or 4x faster, that cuts the time down to 5 days or 2.5 days. Which is dramatically different. Its mostly a CPU-intensive problem with relatively low RAM bandwidth. (Its RAM-heavy, especially with HDR skymaps. So you need lots of RAM but not necessarily fast RAM).

[omnimus]

Or you buy good graphics card and you blow CPU out of the water. But it is true for render engines like Arnold or Corona CPU is main thing. For cycles get gpu.

[dragontamer]

You might be surprised.

http://download.blender.org/institute/benchmark/latest_snaps...

The Threadripper 1950x (16-core) is faster than the 1080 Ti in several tests. Fishy Cat for instance is faster on Threadripper, as well as the difficult "Barbershop Interior".

With all the updates to Zen2, higher clocks, and now 32-cores, I bet that the 2990wx will be incredible and give GPUs a run for their money.

Besides, you'll need a good CPU to handle physics (cloth, fluid, etc. etc.). Not everything can be done on the GPU yet.

CPUs also have the benefit that RAM is super-cheap. You can get 64GB of DDR4, but its basically impossible to get that amount of RAM on a GPU. This allows you to run multiple blender instances to handle multiple frames quite easily. A portion of rendering is still single-thread bound, so an animation can be rendered slightly faster if you allocate a blender-instance per NUMA node.

If you do have a GPU, you can still have CPU+GPU rendering by simply running Blender twice, once with GPU rendering and a 2nd time for CPU Rendering. With the proper settings, you'll generate .png files for each animation independently, which allows for nearly perfect scaling.

Every x399 board I've seen supports quad-GPUs. So you can totally build a beast rig with 4x GPUs + 32 CPU Cores for the best rendering speed possible.

[omnimus]

You make very good point. I do 3D rendering from time to time and i dont actualy play games anymore. Most of my work would greatly benefit from powrful cpu not so much gpu. Interesting i should reconsider.