Hardware Selections for Better Overall Responsiveness

[charles_messenger]

Probably within the next 1-2 years (if AI doesn't put me out of business) I'll need to upgrade my desktop. What are some things to look out for that play a role in overall system responsiveness vs flat out rendering speed? By this I mean parts that help file loading time, export time, bitmap loading to GPU etc...

With my current build my biggest complaint is still "time to first pixel" which is much improved with Vray 7, but still takes a few minutes to start a render when I have a large scene with dozens of textures. I haven't really found any benchmarks or metrics that really show this. For my purposes, it doesn't make a huge difference if a render takes 2 hours or 3. I'd much rather have the added boost when it comes to modeling, and quickly starting renders if I need to compare quick, but small changes. I click a lot and don't like waiting between clicks. Once a render is running I can step away and come back to check in a few hours or overnight.

Is this where a threadripper build would start to shine with the added PCIe bandwidth? Or have the current generation systems gotten much faster with moving data around the board vs what I currently have?

Current Build:
Ryzen 9 5950X
64 GB Ram
2x 3090Ti +NVLink
2TB samsung 990 Pro

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Hi charles_messenger

What you are looking for is good single-threaded performance. The Ryzen 9 9950X or the Intel 285k, or even Apple M3 and M4 they are all pretty good at that, and much better than what you have now. You will see better overall responisveness of the system, better viewport performance in Max, faster time to first pixel and faster loading of bitmaps. These CPUs have nearly double the single threaded performance in your current Ryzen 5950X

On the other hand a Threadripper will be slower in single-threaded tasks, actually much slower. If you care more about the system responsiveness and better time-to-first-pixel don't get a Threadripper

About the PCIe bandwidth, Threadrippers will help if you are running more than 2x GPUs. Other than that stick to consumer CPUs, Ryzen and Intel Ultra.

I hope this helps, let me know if you have questions

In addition, newer CPUs that I mentioned above use DDR5 memory and support PCIe Gen 5 if your GPU and new motherbaord supports it. All of that also helps with overal responsiveness

Best,
Muhammed