Blur Studios discusses the Impact of AMD’s Threadripper 3rd Gen CPUs on Terminator: Dark Fate’s production

When it comes to the CPU market, most PC enthusiasts don’t appreciate the role that high-end desktop processors play out in the world, powering the PC that take on difficult engineering tasks to the rigs which bring the world entertainment. 

To “battle test” AMD’s Ryzen 3rd Generation Threadripper processors, AMD worked with Blur studios to see how its next-generation processors can accelerate professional-grade visual FX workflows. Blur Studio is the company behind some of the visual effects seen in Terminator: Dark Fate, Love, Death Robots and many of League of Legends’ animated shorts. 

So what was Threadripper 3rd Gen’s performance impact? In its best case, Blur Studios’ VFX Supervisor, Dan Akers, stated that some tasks were accelerated from 5 minutes to five seconds, highlighting how impactful a product like Threadripper can be during specific tasks. That said, Akers never stated what kind of system Blur Studios used for these tasks previously, and it seems likely that this performance change was due to factors outside of raw processing power. 

The beauty of AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 3rd Generation processors is that they offer users a wide I/O, plenty of CPU cores and a large number of memory channels. With PCIe 4.0, fast DDR4 memory and up to 32 CPU cores (assuming that Blur Studios are using AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 3970X). This allows users to accelerate their workflows with increased CPU compute and through boosted I/O functions. Simply put, it takes more than CPU power to accelerate some professional workflows, which is why AMD’s TRX40 platform plans to deliver more than its competition on the I/O front.

When creating the visual FX for Terminator: Dark Fate, Blur Studios “threw the Threadripper at” many of the movie’s most complex scenes, knowing that it could deal with how “computationally expensive” those scenes were. 

The impact of Threadripper wasn’t just that rendering speeds were faster. It allowed Blur’s artists to iterate on their work more often while maintaining the same deadlines. This allowed them to offer a higher level of polish on their work and to make better use of their artist’s time. In this regard, hardware can impact creativity, creating a better environment for innovation. 

Below is AMD’s video on its work with Blur Studios, including their video description below.