AMD drops the mic. Releases a 32-core/64 thread Threadripper 2 CPU. GPU rendering still viable/justified?

[mitchgates]

I'm a little confused about what the real-world bench results for the 7980XE are since the VRay Bench page lists scores ranging from 27-52 seconds .

[Alex_M]

That's because some run their CPU at default speeds (no overclocking), some run it with light overclocking, some run it with heavy overclocking and then there are people that have overclocked it pedal to the metal just enough so that it doesn't explode in flames before the benchmark completes. The real results of 7980XE is 37 seconds and can be seen in the image I posted in this thread. That 27 seconds result was likely made with mad overclocking which was just stable enough for the short duration of the benchmark. As per the comments of the author of that 27 seconds score, he had overclocked his 7980XE to 4.8 Ghz on all cores and his CPU temp was 93°C. And that was after only 27 seconds of rendering! Most CPUs die at temps over 105°C and he was dangerously close to that threshold.

[werticus]

The problem with GPU rendering is ram. If your working on scenes that fit into GPU's ram then it is fine otherwise it is a bust. 2080 series cards have no extra ram and we still don't know if NVLINK allows shared ram on those cards like the quadro supports.