Threadripper 5995 vs 7995 (and some other build questions)

[4DS Niklas]

Hey everyone,

we are currently considering building a new workstation to process our increasingly demanding projects (up to 30k images, generating high resolution meshes and textures/orthos).

So of course, before investing a lot of money, i would like to make sure to make the right decisions regarding the hardware components.
This is what i am currently thinking:

CPU: Threadripper 5995 or Threadripper 7995: Generally, i am told the threadripper enables the usage of a lot of ECC RAM, which should help preventing crashes while the computer is working on a project for a longer time. The 7995 seems to be a LOT more expensive than the 5995, so i would really appreciate some insight into whether this would be worth the investment?

GPU: 4090 or 5090: I have read that the architecture of the 4090 is tried and proven to work well with metashape, while the 5090s architecture seems to be somewhat unstable? Also, i did not find a clear consesus on if the 5090 does actually have a computational advantage for our purpose. Anyone here maybe tested both or found a meaningful  benchmark test for this?

RAM: For RAM i am thinking 256gb DDR5 ECC RAM.

Mainboard: Here i am not really sure what to look for. Obviously, it should be compatible with all the other parts, but is there something else specific i need to look for?

If anyone can give me some insight on any of these points, it would be very much appreciated!

Kind regards
Niklas

[Corensia]

Just some of my thoughts on this topic.

Generally I find Threadrippers to be a huge waste of money if you're looking to exclusively process using Metashape.  I haven't seen tests for the specific models you mentioned, but in the past Threadrippers have generally been slower than the latest top end CPUs in the I9 or R9 series.

Max memory is important but less so these days as they have improved the processing algorithms that bypass those limits now. We've processed over 100k images with just 128gb of RAM for reference. Additionally, you mentioned crashes but that is also very rare and now progress is saved incrementally so you don't even have to start over from scratch.

So overall, my opinion is that it's not worth unless you have other uses for the Threadrippers.

[4DS Niklas]

Thanks for your reply.

Can you elaborate on that 100k images project?

Mostly bigger projects work fine on our current machines, it just takes a few days sometimes.
But when generating textures for bigger models, we are very limited in the resolution, because if we choose too high, the calculations will crash with a insufficient memory error. Also 128gb RAM.

I also thought that should not happen, as you said this problem should be solvable by an effective algorithm, but it does still happen.

[Bzuco]

Here is the tip for processing large projects https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYRIC-qkZJ8
Instead of buying threadripper, you can buy another PC(similar performance you have) with another MS pro license and you can split the project between two computers. And not only that, you can run more than one local worker node for better utilization(CPU/GPU) during certain stages.

7995 is more expensive, because except for the fact that it has more cores, it is also manufactured on newer process, so its performance per watt is better.
You can buy RTX 5090, its vram is worth and also performance.
Best advice before buy new HW is to monitor CPU/GPU/RAM/VRAM utilization during whole process on your current PC. Then you will know if you need more CPU cores, more ram/vram, faster GPU... it depends also of your project settings you are using.

[loggie24]

We have a workstation with a 7995wx, 512gb of RAM etc. The main benefit comes from the ability to run multiple processes at once. As some already mentioned it might be overkill for processing one project at a time, but we can do several at once without noticing much slowdown.

That said I would like to think that the benefits scale with the amount of images, unfortunately I don't have data to back that up as most of our scans top out at 1-2k images. Though my intuition says this is the case as I have noticed some bigger scans processing faster on the workstation compared to smaller scans on my Ryzen 9950x, but take that with a grain of salt.

[Corensia]

Hey Niklas, the project was several years ago so.... I went back into the archives to check and apparently my memory failed me.

The project had a total of 120k images BUT we processed them ~10k at a time, I believe for time efficiency purposes in case it crashes. We processed orthos in medium, and 3D models in high but texturing was only done in 16k because the model wasn't actually a deliverable and just a reference/testing on our part. Haven't had similar massive projects since so I guess I don't have much help for your 30k project. Sorry for the misunderstanding!

It was during that project when we decided against getting a Threadripper based on data we saw.