JPR has published a report on Foundry Nuke’s performance: How to empower your VFX artist with Lenovo ThinkStation P8 Workstations, powered by AMD Threadripper PRO 9000 WX-Series.
This white paper, authored by Jon Peddie Research (JPR) and sponsored by Lenovo, evaluates the performance impact of the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 9000 WX-Series processors on Foundry Nuke 16. Digital compositing workflows in high-end film and television production demand a complex balance between high-frequency per-core performance for interactivity and massive multi-core parallelism for render outputs.
Using the real-world workloads on PxF Nukebench benchmark, JPR independently tested the Lenovo ThinkStation P8 across a range of AMD processor configurations, from 12 to 96 cores.
Key findings include:
- Significant Performance Gains: Upgrading from the previous generation (7945WX) to the 9000 WX-Series yields performance improvements between 34% and 152%, effectively reaching up to 2.52× the baseline performance.
- Record-Breaking Results: The AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 9985WX (64-core) achieved 10.029 fps in Scanline rendering, the fastest result ever recorded by the Nuke community as of March 2026.
- High Return on Investment (ROI): For a senior VFX artist, the productivity gains from reduced render times can recover between $127 and $863 per week. The cost of a CPU upgrade can be recouped in as little as four to 20 weeks through these efficiency gains.
- Technical Optimization: The report highlights the advantages of the AMD “Zen 5” architecture, including higher instructions per clock (IPC), increased memory bandwidth (up to DDR5-6400 MT/s), and 128 PCIe Gen 5.0 lanes for GPU and storage expansion.
Spoiler alert: JPR shattered the previous performance records at all tiers.
For more details and conclusions, including impact on VFX artists’ productivity, ROI analysis and more, see the full report, including all performance results and user productivity impact across the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 9000 WX-Series processor line on low- and high-complexity projects.
The report and accompanying material, including testing data, can be found on jonpeddie.com.
