It crushes Intel at C4D rendering, and the above graph shows it coming out on top in Vegas as well, so I'd say go for it.

It's no longer it's (intel) AMD CPU so good in performance and price point. It's no brainer to go for AMD. If you don't care about your hard earn money. Then by all means get the $2000 Intel chip for slightly more or less performance vs. AMD. If any one think the 2990ws is not good enough. I will be gladly take it off your hand. And I will thanks you for it.

Only intel 7960x turns up a lot. Ryzen is without a chance then. All tests done on 32GB RAM. You will insert 64 and the price is not attractive at all.

In the case of 2950x, the benefits are marginal.

AMD CPU sure looks good in the chart. But I cant help seeing render speed gain benefit is not lineair to the number of cores, but the gain benefit is rather decreasing exponentially. Parallelism has it limits.

I wonder how the upcoming intel Core i9-9900K with 8 cores and 16 threads will do in the chart, price is probably not that high (around 450 dollar) as it will be mainstream processor for the new Z390 chipset (and the older Z370 with a BIOS update), but best of all it will be able to run 5.0 GHz boost clock in single and dual core operations. 4 core boost is rated at 4.8 GHz while 6/8 core boost is rated at 4.7 GHz

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/core-i9-9900k-vs-ryzen-7-2700x,37795.html

AMD CPU sure looks good in the chart. But I cant help seeing render speed gain benefit is not lineair to the number of cores, but the gain benefit is rather decreasing exponentially. Parallelism has it limits.

I wonder how the upcoming intel Core i9-9900K with 8 cores and 16 threads will do in the chart, price is probably not that high (around 450 dollar) as it will be mainstream processor for the new Z390 chipset (and the older Z370 with a BIOS update), but best of all it will be able to run 5.0 GHz boost clock in single and dual core operations. 4 core boost is rated at 4.8 GHz while 6/8 core boost is rated at 4.7 GHz

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/core-i9-9900k-vs-ryzen-7-2700x,37795.html

All well and good but it will have only 16 PCIE lanes, in my opinion not enough for a good system.

No comparison between the mid range CPU vs high end. With 16 PCIE lanes and 5ghz still not good enough and still no match in any way you cut it. High end gpu sold with a premium price for a reasons.

I also have to wonder if more cores is a better "future proof" choice. With limited increases in ghz, software developers need to look to parallelism to solve problems. I know there are some tasks that don't work well in parallel, but often there seems to be creative ways or workflow changes that can take advantage.

@BruceUSA

On your threadripper system, do you have enough cores to have one instance of Vegas rendering while editing on a second instance?

I also have to wonder if more cores is a better "future proof" choice. With limited increases in ghz, software developers need to look to parallelism to solve problems. I know there are some tasks that don't work well in parallel, but often there seems to be creative ways or workflow changes that can take advantage.

@BruceUSA

On your threadripper system, do you have enough cores to have one instance of Vegas rendering while editing on a second instance?

Oh hell yeah. I did that while rendering 4k 30p and working on another Vegas 4k project with no issue. And other occasions I exporting a project in Davinci resolve and editing I. Vegas.

81/5000

With 390 there are 24 PCIE lines. 16 lines are occupied by the GPU. It remains 8.
It's still very little.

No comparison between the mid range CPU vs high end. With 16 PCIE lanes and 5ghz still not good enough and still no match in any way you cut it. High end gpu sold with a premium price for a reasons.

 

With 390 there are 24 PCIE lines. 16 lines are occupied by the GPU. It remains 8.

It's still very little.

That is not entirely correct, it is a bit more complicated. If you have a coffee lake processor and the Z370 (and I assume also the newer sister Z390) the CPU has 16 PCI-e 3.0 lanes directly (e.g. for the main videocard), and 24 extra PCI-e 3.0 lanes via the Z370 (to be used for lan, audio, sata, USB and/or extra PCI-e video card).

So that is 40 PCI-e lanes in total... But there is a catch. The Z370 is connected via a DMI bus (which you could think of a being a 4 PCI lane equivalent) to the CPU. All 24 lanes must go through the DMI link. All devices on the chipset may only send 4GB/s worth of data to the CPU simultaneously...

To come back to intel vs AMD, there is also a possible (future) advantage for Intel with AVX instruction set: Magix sister NLE, Magix video Pro X has in their latest release (around mid 2018) added AVX optimizations (I assume they are not supported by AMD), here is an extract:

Magix says that rendering HEVC/H.265 video can now done using the NVIDIA GPU encoder making export much faster than before, while AVX optimization speeds up image processing and improves the accuracy of color correction.

Now here I am speculating, but Vegas team could do the same thing (as they could get the intel (!) from Magix video pro X colleagues in Germany ...)

All very good information to keep in mind. Thanks Bitman.

I noticed there were a couple of old AMD phenom users this week complaining of crashes related to a missing instruction set with those chips, so this is a potential future "gotcha" with an AMD choice. Maybe. :) Depends how mainstream AMD threadrippers, etc. become.

To come back to intel vs AMD, there is also a possible (future) advantage for Intel with AVX instruction set: Magix sister NLE, Magix video Pro X has in their latest release (around mid 2018) added AVX optimizations (I assume they are not supported by AMD), here is an extract:

some amd chips got avx

The new ones?

Yes, they do https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/ryzen_threadripper/2950x .