As a note to folks who do a lot of Radiance rendering, I’ve recently added a 16-core AMD Zen 2 core (Ryzen 9 3950X) machine to my stable and it blows every other machine away with respect to Radiance performance. I don’t have numbers from my Zen 1+ core, but they weren’t nearly as good as these. The times below are all of the scene from my benchmark page: http://markjstock.org/pages/rad_bench.html on this machine with Fedora 31, Radiance 5R3, GCC 9.3.1 with -Ofast -march=znver2 flags.
Single-threaded performance:
593.31s — Ryzen 9 3950X, 4.4 GHz (fastest single-core result ever)
722.64s — Core i7-4790K, 4.6 GHz (previous record holder, from 2014!)
Multiprocess (rpiece) performance:
82.35s — Ryzen 9 3950X, 16 cores, 4.1 GHz (low parallel efficiency on such a small render job)
114.25s — Ryzen 9 3950X, 8 cores, 4.1 GHz
116.31s — Intel i9-7960X, 16 cores, 4.4 GHz (previous record, from 2018)
162.93s — Intel i7-5960X, 8 cores, 4.5 GHz
The whole-machine performance on larger render jobs is incredible: 3x to 4x the overall speed of my overclocked 8-core Intel. I simply don’t have enough work to keep this machine busy!