Can anyone tell me which view modes are the most demanding on ram and processor, and which are easiest, and how they roughly rank comparatively? Intuitively it seems that wireframe would be the least demanding with Render being the most, and the rest somewhere in the middle, but it would be good to know how it varies; Rhino slows if there are too many perspective detail windows in a particular project.
Of course all the modes can be modified, so this is all assuming you’ve touched nothing. Depending on your model and your hardware, the slowest will actually be “Shaded,” because drawing curves is a totally different process from shading polygons, so it’s basically having to render a wireframe AND a rendered view, then figure out how to occlude the wireframe so it’s not just sitting on top of the shaded view. Depending on how complex the model is and your hardware, Wireframe is usually but not always faster than a Rendered view. Rendered mode will probably only be slowest overall if you’ve set up a ton of lights and transparency. The other technical/pen/artistic modes are slower yet because they use an advanced lighting setup and some complicated trickery to create the “impression” of 2D curves.