Revit 2019 and IOMeter

This page contains two benchmarks that we have implemented for recently into our CPU reviews. We are always looking for benchmarks that provide more of a real-world look at performance instead of just synthetic workloads and are excited about these test. That being said, we are always looking for feedback and suggestions as to our benchmark suite!

Revit 2019 – RFO Benchmark

RFO Benchmark is a community developed series of scripts that can be used to evaluate system-level performance in Revit, the popular building information modeling software from Autodesk used primarily by those in the Architecture fields.

This benchmark tests several different aspects of Revit functionality, which stress the system in various ways including the following subtests:

  • Update (converting a file to the Revit 2019 format from a previous version)
  • Model Creation 
  • Export (converting the document to a format for raster printing)
  • 3D Render 
  • Graphics (refreshing and rotating within the viewport of Revit)

While the Intel i9-9980XE leads the AMD Ryzen Threadripper processors in the Graphics and Update file tests, the 32-core AMD processor manages to eke out a 7% lead in the Render test, and 5% lead in the Model Export test.

IOMeter

One of the more overlooked aspects of single-threaded performance is disk throughput. As disks get faster and faster, a single application thread can struggle to achieve full bandwidth in some scenarios. 

To evaluate this, we are running a RAM disk of 1024MB on the host machine using the Softperfect RAM disk application, and then testing throughput in IOMeter with a 100% random 4K workload. Since a RAM disk is the fastest possible storage device, this will give us an idea of how IOPS scale with single-threaded processor performance.

While generation gains between the i9-7980XE and i9-9980XE are within a few percentage points of each other, the i9-9980XE has a massive 90% lead in IOPS over the Threadripper 2990WX. Still, the consumer-oriented i9-9900K still has a 20% advantage over the 18-core CPU.

« PreviousNext »