Threadripper or vega- blender cycles rendering

[Matthewv1998]

So this is a little odd but i figured this more or less fit in the cpu department. 

So i have a 1700x and i've been putting it through its paces in games, video editing and rendering. So lately i've been getting into animating with blender, using the cyles engine. Now the 1700x is good for stills but it takes a long time to render out an animation. Even a low quality 30 second 30 fps animaion takes a really long time to render and i really want to push higher quality. So i know blender has a gpu compute option, however i only have a single rx 480, and my ram is slow, a barebones 2133 kit i got months before ryzens launch. So should i upgrade my ram or go and try to get threadripper once i get a job or go for vega for more compute power? What would be the better choice?

[Zodiark1593]

The RAM speed itself has a negligible impact on render speed in Cycles. As for whether or not to go with Threadripper, it will depend on the complexity of the scenes you aspire to. 

 

GPU rendering is limited to VRAM. If you exceed that, you must fall back to software rendering via cpu. If you're making highly complex scenes that may threaten to saturate the VRAM capacity of Vega, you may wish to look into Threadripper instead. If you can fit your project into VRAM requirements, even multiple Vega cards should work happily. 

 

Note on the last point, VRAM does not stack with multiple cards. Only compute power, and to this end, you can use cards of varying capability (this isn't Crossfire or SLI after all), such as a VEGA and a 480, so long as the scene fits into the card with the least VRAM.