Revit 2021 – AMD Ryzen 5000 Series CPU Performance

Introduction

AMD's Ryzen 5000 Series processors have shown stellar performance across a wide range of applications so far, and now we have the opportunity to test them head-to-head against Intel's Core series in Autodesk Revit 2021. For a long time, Intel's lead in single-threaded performance has kept them at the forefront of general engineering work, while AMD has been chipping away at high-thread-count workloads like rendering and simulations. With their latest Ryzen models, however, AMD has taken the lead in instructions-per-clock and rivals Intel in terms of clock speed as well, so let's see how that affects real-world processing in this popular BIM software.

Test Hardware

Here are the detailed specs of the test platforms we used:

Benchmark Details

We do not have our own suite of tests for Revit here at Puget Systems, so we use the excellent RFO Benchmark. The latest version as of this writing is 3.3, which in turn supports the latest release of Revit (2021) so that is what we are utilizing for this article. Since the focus here is on CPU performance, we ran the "Full_Standard" preset. It runs each portion of the test three times, and then averages the results.

Results & Analysis

Here are charts showing the results for each section of the RFO Benchmark. In some cases, these are the aggregate of all results in a given section (like "Export") to avoid having 20+ separate graphs; those situations are denoted with "total" in the title. AMD's Ryzen processor scores are shown in green with Intel's Core CPUs in blue, and each chart is sorted by performance (fastest at the top):

On the Update File test, we can see that the new AMD processors perform very well – coming in around 10% faster than Intel's models.

Model Creation is an aggregate of several short tests related to creating and modifying various aspects of a project within Revit. Again, AMD's processors took the lead from Intel here – though by a smaller margin than in the previous chart.

Like the Model test before, this Export score is also a combination of several individual tests: exporting all project views to several different file types (PNG, DWF, DWG) as well as printing those views to both vector and raster images. And again, AMD's Ryzen 5000 Series gave the fastest results.

While the first three charts covered tasks in Revit that are primarily single-threaded, which is why performance looks so similar across them, this Render test utilizes multiple cores within a processor very effectively. That allows Intel's 10-core i9 10900K to pull ahead of AMD's 8-core 5800X, but only just barely… and the higher core count AMD chips far surpass what Intel offers here.

Please note that these results are only for the built-in Revit rendering engine, so if you use a plug-in like V-Ray you'll want to look at our articles for that software instead.

This last test is of graphics performance while viewing a model – changing view styles, refreshing, rotating, etc. This can be heavily impacted by the video card and other system specs as well, but it is worth noting that once again we see AMD's CPUs outpacing Intel's.

Are AMD’s Ryzen 5000 Series processors good for Revit?

Yes, AMD's Ryzen 5000 Series processors are fantastic in this application! These new chips continue to impress, and definitely take the performance lead in all aspects of Revit that the RFO Benchmark covers. Intel's 10th Gen Core models are only about 5-10% behind most of the time, so it isn't a massive difference – but for those who are not doing a lot of rendering, AMD's new Ryzen 7 5800X offers fantastic performance that is just as good as the larger core count Ryzen 9 models for a lot less money. Those who do a lot of rendering may want to consider the 5950X for similar modeling performance with ~50% faster render speeds, or potentially even move up to AMD's higher core count Threadripper line.

The one downside with these CPUs is that they have been in very short supply during the months following their launch in November of 2020. We look forward to offering these AMD Ryzen processors in our Revit modeling systems soon, once their availability improves.