Mine has been teetering, so getting ready to get a new one (been running rhino on bootcamp for at least 7 years on two prior machines, no real complaints as the very reliable hardware makes the hassle worth it).
I’m not really thrilled with the higher price point, but the specs are good enough, and with the 2.9ghz processor and the 4gb graphics card (Radeon 460) only a $300 upgrade it’s getting a little easier to swallow, I’ve had a tough time with graphics card crashes while handling some large scans…
Base level ram is 16 gigs and storage is 512gb SSD which is supposedly markely faster than the one I had in my 2012, which was already damn fast. I dono about anyone else but 512gb is fine for me, I wouldn’t pay for the upgrade to 1 or 2tb, I could get a much larger RAID for the same price.
Please don’t make me the first guinea pig! I guess my main concern is that the graphics card is not a bust somehow.
TIA!
Thanks Jeff, perhaps I was vainly hoping that McNeel staff ahd some insight re. the graphics card, so in this particular case, “nobody” is a relative term So to clarify, this post is really directed towards the McNeel developers who might have worked at least with the cards, if not the whole machine.
After all, the guinea pigs are never the first to “receive” the goods, the mad scientists have to test the stuff on themselves first to bring the goods the point of testing on us, so I’m just checking for an inside scoop…
ok… but i think you’re not understanding me when i said nobody has them yet… (or the gpus which have also just been announced)
not sure how mcneel staff would get them before other people because apple doesn’t really roll like that except in a few rare cases (but you don’t actually hear about these things since the people are typically under NDA with apple in these situations).
anyway…
McNeel developer Dan Belcher who is generally working on Rhino for Mac does have one on order…
not sure if he’s going to be bootcamping it to test windows rhino on there but regardless, it appears you’re looking at another few weeks until a single rhino developer has had a chance to use one.
Gotcha. Somehow I thought maybe there was some possibility of forsight, since the GPU’s are AMD after all, rather than Apple, so I thought there might be some chance at design transparency that might in turn be telling to the properly trained eye, sans an actual hardware test.
But ok, I see I will have to cool my heels. Yes, the GPUs are 3 weeks out and I think the delivery time will be consistent for quite a while, so was just looking to get some info as 3 weeks is tacked to every day I delay, causing me to deal with my beat up machine longer than I’d rather.
I just installed Rhino 5 and Windows 10 on my new MacBook Pro 15", 2.7 i7, Radeon Pro 460, 1TB SSD. Havn’t done any “work” yet, still installing things. So far everything seems to be good.
I’m looking for a lower-budget early 2016 MacBook Pro to run Bootcamp with Rhino using jewellery plugins (such as Matrix, RhinoGold, RhinoJewel). Will the following work well?
MacBook Pro 13", 8GB, 2.7 i5, Iris 6100, 256GB SSD
MacBook Pro 13", 8GB, 2.0 i5, Iris 540, 256GB SSD
Or are there particular specs/upgrades you guys recommend?
Without a dedicated GPU renders might take a (long) while, and even Rhino’s renderer might outperform the integrated grapfhics cards in those machines. If you are going to work with any largeish textured 3D scans meshes I think you will be hating life. Previews when exporting may also lag badly, as will any rendered windows. But, I’ve never tried an integrated graphics processor with Rhino, so I could be wrong. I hear they have improved but have not experienced it myself. The fact that they use base ram does not appeal to me.
I found 256gb to be too small to host both the Mac OS and Win7- I thought I could get away with a 40gb partition for win7 and that was a stupid mistake, I can only hold a few projects at a time on board, and still no a/v media on the mac side, which broke the xml file to my iTunes content when moving it to external, a real drag. I have a new machine on order w/ 512gb, I am expecting I will have 128gb for the pc side and the balance Mac OS, still not great but the larger drives were unethically expensive.
The faster processor will help w Booleans. I hate it when my screen goes grey because the thing is ruminating over an operation, so I would avoid the 2.0 ghz i5 machine. If you are doing lots of pave’ and expecting nice renders these machines might leave you hanging much of the time…
I think you will get much better performance from a 15" mbp even dating as far back as 2012. An i7 w/2.5ghz is not uncommon, SSD w/ 256gb or better and dedicated gpu of at least a gig is the norm for those machines. I am running a 2012 myself and it kicks ass, drives a huge display, I don’t even render just use screen captures as the output is already print quality dpi- I wouldn’t be replacing it at all but for the fact that it drank a cup of coffee two years ago and the resulting quirks have finally caught up with it…
All that said less than 10 years ago I used to run Rhino on a $450 laptop that somehow came with a 3.5" floppy drive and loved it, so you might be a-ok with the above machines you are interested in…
For various reasons (qwerty keyboard needed but buying in my home country of France where keyboards are azerty, tax refund schemes for people living outside of the EU…), I will most probably have to buy a Macbook Pro that is currently offered on Apples website. I find the new TouchBar to be a waste of money and have heard that Macbook Pro Retina’s are un-upgradable when it comes to SSDs. That being said and taking your above post into consideration, I’m now looking at the following:
MacBook Pro 15", 16GB, 2.8 i7, Intel Iris Pro, 256GB SSD (<— which I plan on upgrading myself to a 512GB to save on costs)
Do you think this will be better for the use I intend to make of it?
I do not plan on working with large textured 3D scans, however I do think pavé and such will be important. Will the Intel Iris Pro graphics card be strong enough? I’m a bit of a newb when it comes to GPUs and if they’re dedicated/integrated. I have no idea what any of that means. Can you please clarify?
For Rhino WIP for Windows I installed an AMD RX 480. The WIP runs fine on the RX 480, the main reason to get one is to ensure the Raytraced mode of the WIP works with AMD GPUs.There’s still some work to be done, but already some speed gains are seen. For me the RX 480 is very interesting because of the 8GB on-board memory, meaning I can render quite large scenes.
Integrated means that the GPU is part off the motherboard or even on the CPU. Dedicated means the GPU is one an extension card (graphics card), something that is relatively easy to swap for an upgrade.
Generally recent dedicated GPUs are more powerful than integrated ones.
One of the main things I look for in a new machine is a dedicated GPU. I am no guru, but basically the thing runs in parallel to your CPU, has it’s own RAM and is designed quite specifically for graphically intensive operations such as rendering and driving large displays. “Integrated graphics” means that the CPU itself handles display driving and rendering tasks, taking RAM and CPU clock cycles from other tasks.
If rendering or driving a large external display were not issues, or if getting great real time renders on the large (pixel-wise) retina display that I can just screen-grab and build right into presentations while on the road was not a concern of mine, I would probably not be getting a Mac at all but a significantly cheaper machine that still ran an i7 processor w/ integrated graphics, had decent ram, storage and build quality- and was perhaps beverage-proof ;). I have had great experiences with Rhino on moderate laptops, so I couldn’t see paying Apple prices for an modestly-spec’d machine.
However, after a reasonable amount of shopping, surprisingly I have found the MBP to be the best value of machines with dedicated GPUs (even on the 2016’s with the price increase). There are certainly a few cheaper but from what I have found they have all appeared gimped in other significant respects, and I do not trust the systems integration of most other manufacturers as much as I do Apple’s. I find their level of component integration leads to the long lived and reliable machines. I have gotten 4 years out of my last two MBP’s and expect to get 4 years out of my next. That said I am still getting applecare this time :]
I would certainly be interested in hearing about other machines with comparable specs, pricing and build quality, if anyone reading this wishes to chime in.
This isn’t quite true. The graphics processors that are “integrated” on the CPU chip are indeed on the same chip as the CPU, but are additional circuits almost as separate as a plug-in video board. I say almost because they do benefit from being on the same chip so the bus that connects them can be much higher speed. But they also suffer because there is much less real estate on the chip for them to use and their power consumption must be accounted for in the chip’s power budget. Factors like this, along with the fact that the CPU manufacturers aren’t really at the forefront of GPU technology accounts for them having substantially lower performance than the leading dedicated boards. Performance has apparently improved markedly since the CPU manufacturers started down this road and things are now at the point where many Rhino users can apparently get the performance they need from the chips with integrated GPUs. (I still use dedicated GPUs.)
Thank you for clarifying, I wasn’t quite capable of carrying into the specifics. I heard they were working well these days. I suppose it would be an interesting exercise (informational only for me, since I have already ordered a new machine) to search the boards for history of integrated graphics chips performance. Presumably the latest iteration would perform even better, but that judgement might really depend on the demands that were being placed on it. Small textures or renders would be fine I’m sure, I’m just spoiled with never having to render anything any longer- full screen screen captures in a well-set up rendered view hi-res viewport is enough for me these days. I know I used to get the same quality output years ago but I would have to render and wait, sometimes overnight in the really bad old days.
Hopefully the integrated graphics could render something decent fast enough. No hi res screen+ no gpu = something non-mac for me, for the same budget I could get two low ends machines and have one just for rendering, which is what I used to do.
With modern render engines utilizing the GPU (like the Raytraced mode in Rhino WIP) I would go for a machine with two dedicated GPUs - one to drive the display, the other to render with. This is how I have my dev machine currently set up: one GTX 760 and one XFX AMD RX 480. I can select which of the two to use for rendering with Raytraced/Cycles for Rhino. That way one can work on the same machine and render with GPU power without having to switch.
That sounds fantastic, but only if I could be chained to a desktop machine- I have to work on location much of the time, so this is not really an option. Sometimes I really wish I could drag a desktop around with me though.
