The Blender Foundation is wrapping up development on Blender 2.8, “The Workflow Update”. We have been following it for a while, but today’s announcement caught me by surprise: a benchmark database. It seems simple, right? Blender wants its users to know what hardware is best to use, especially when rendering images in Cycles (which can be damn slow).
A bit lopsided…
The solution is to make a version of Blender that creates and validates benchmarks, then compiles the data on their website. It’s still early days for this, with just 2052 entries (at the time of writing) and the majority of those were from Linux boxes. Also, they only break it down into a handful of categories: Fastest CPU, Fastest Compute Device, Submissions Per OS, then a few charts that compare the individual benchmark scenes against one another in a hardware-agnostic fashion. They pledge to add a lot of more metrics in the future.
Personally, I’m curious to see a performance vs OS metric. Some benchmarks back from 2016 (Blender 2.77 on an EVGA GTX 980 Ti) show Linux out-performing Windows 10 by over 2x, with Windows 7 landing in between (closer to Linux than Windows 10). At the time, it was attributed to NVIDIA’s CUDA driver being horribly optimized for the newer OS, which seems to be validated by the close showing of the GTX 1080 on Windows 10 and Linux, but I would like to see a compiled list of up-to-date results. I could soon be able to.
Well cycles rendering on the
Well cycles rendering on the GPU is faster than Blender rendering on the CPU, or even Cycles rendering on the CPU if Blender does not detect a GCN 1.2 or later GPU, if you are using AMD’s GPUs. And older AMD GPUs will not work with Cycles rendering on the GPU so Blender will default to using Cycles on the CPU and that’s very slow compared to GPU rendering of any kind.
Nvidia has been supporting Cycles longer on its hardware with Blender making use of Nvidia’s proprietary CUDA code path for Nvidia’s hardware.
Blender’s CPU rendering makes for a good CPU performance benchmark but does nothing for those that want some Blender GPU rendering done on the various makes and models of GPUs that can support Blender Cycles Rendering via the OpenCL code path, AMD’s GPUs(GCN 1.2/later), or even CUDA for that matter.
Blender’s 2.8’s PBR(physically based-rendering) engine is another feature that’s very interesting along with the Workflow improvments to help speed production along so this Blender Benchmark, and related online service, is really going to be good for those needing information prior to any GPU purchasing decisions. And there has been a lack of that Blender GPU performance metrics collected in an organized manner compared to the other benchmarks out there that target the proprietary Graphics software packages on proprietary OSs.
” It’s still early days for this, with just 2052 entries (at the time of writing) and the majority of those were from Linux boxes.”
This is Linux focus is welcome and necessary for Blender owing to its open source nature and the fact that more Windows OS(7, 8.1) based Blender users will be forced to take the Linux option once windows 7, and 8.1 go EOL by 2020-2023. Also look at Apple taking the depreciation path with OpenGL and OpenCL and that combined with windows 10 becoming an OSAAS(Operating System As A Service). So Linux needs to be focused on now more than ever to be more fully ready for 2020-2023 and 7/8.1 no longer an option unless running inside a locked down Linux Kernel based Hypervisor hosted OS instance(KVM, Xen, other) and isolated from the internet.
There is plenty of windows Benchmarking resources for graphics software on CPUs/GPUs but not very much Blender/Linux and GPU focused metrics being available so that really needs to change in order to build a stronger and better performing Blender on Linux alternative for graphics and animation software users on any Linux OS distro.
Have you heard of the adage
Have you heard of the adage “write less, say more”?
Oh! The Wall-O-Text has
Oh! The Wall-O-Text has gotten under your hair Triggered skin, and now you must express you displeasure without adding anything to the conversation.
It’s been a good while but word-count hurts that single cell of pale Grey floating in that vast ocean of Lipid White!
Blender/Linux and no forced updates that bork everyone’s productivity foisted upon us all by the Lords of Redmond!
Look at that single cell twitch in rage, it’s getting hot enough to flash fry a large butterball terkey between your hairy ears! All that lard is a bubbling hot in that thick boney pressure cooker that is your head.
Dude, I think you should seek
Dude, I think you should seek help. I mean that sincerely.
Too late. He’s dead, Jim.
Too late. He’s dead, Jim.
Tries to insult someones
Tries to insult someones intelligence.
Can’t spell turkey.
Delicious.
Dyslexia or even
Dyslexia or even aphasia(Periods of inability to understand spoken language or read written text) can occur also but bad spelling is not an indicator of poor intellgence.
But Really there is only those that get upset at what they do not have the ability to understand, and Blender and Lnux will be fine for non gaming graphics workloads because Gaming/FPS does not really matter to most folks.
Dyslexia or even aphasia do not affect intellgence juts the ability to spell and sometimes read and comprehend. But those others who are afraid of amounts of text, well that’s just stupidity.
I’d have to agree Scott.
I
I’d have to agree Scott.
I for one, would like to see how OS compare. To my surprise I heard how Win10 distributes work loads amongst the cores is poor. I would also like to see which games/apps make the most of their hardware. There’s a lot of latency in software. How about developers fixing up the plumbing so the it works faster ?
There are plenty of benchmark
There are plenty of benchmark results for Blender, done with the benchmark scenes that existed before.
To be correct: Nvidia does not support Cycles, Nvidia supports CUDA and Cycles uses CUDA. OpenCL has been much less optimized than Nvidia (even though Nvidia is sadly highy proprietary) and originally did not work at all really.
I’m just looking for the old benchmark, it used to be on Blenderartists, the BMW scene by Mike Pan, there were thousands of results, most of them done by GPU, as with Blender, you always want to use a GPU whenever possible.
This shows that often, Windows is slower than Linux for example on the same hardware, as WDDM is an overhead slowing down Windows.
http://blog.thepixelary.com/post/167616662857/improving-performance-of-blenders-cycles
If you can’t read more than 1 sentence, you are learning disabled and might want to change that, since your life will be very limited: You won’t be able to study or learn anything complex, can’t read books, you will be confined to low wages, not a good place to be. Defending such an unwillingness of becoming more intelligent is also not really useful. I have noticed this borderline illiteracy with many Americans, I don’t know if it is the MTV / TV culture or the constantly getting worse schools in the US.