Apple Metal

Will the future of tool of intern rendering support the Apple metal Engine? Maybe for real time stuff?!

We do not yet have any concrete plans for a display pipeline that uses Apple Metal.

For Rhino 6 for Mac, we plan to migrate to the OpenGL Core Profile 3.3 (or 4.1 if you have a nice GPU). You can see the Apple OpenGL capabilities matrix here.

For Rhino 8 mac we can expect that it supports Apple Metal, right? It would be important to increase 2d drafting and display speed.

We are working on a metal based display engine for V8.

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Great news. Look forward to trying the WIP in due course.

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Guys I love you!!! That is 100% the right choice. We will keep supporting you. :ok_hand:

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Highly beautiful news guys!!! Will also do my best to support this :martial_arts_uniform::rocket::earth_africa:

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This is the reason why we will buy now the license of 7 mac.

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I have no idea if this is of interest in this context:

sounds like running vulkan on top of metal is viable. I always thought that vulkan is the successor to openGL, that’s why I always though that it would at some point in time be relevant for rhino. but that does not seem to be the case? I really have no actual knowledge about this stuff but I’m always interested to get a better understanding of the underlying stuff (see, I just call it stuff :sweat_smile:). I’m always thankful when developers give a simple explanation for layman’s. though I also understand that this might be annoying for developers, so I don’t expect any answer.

anything native is obviously a better solution.

We looked into MoltenVK, but decided to directly use the Metal API

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Sounds like the straightest and best way- but also the way with most „pain in the ass“ :slight_smile:
Curios whats coming - performence wise maybe a big step :slight_smile:

though probably more work and ground up new, I assume native metal will pay off in the long run.

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It might work better because Apple doesn’t do a particularly good job with OpenGL. It’s a PITA for us because we can’t use Metal in Windows.
Twice the development work for no real benefit is how I see it.
It is was it is.

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something cross plattform would be great and maybe worth a fresh start, but a windows-macos, both-native solution does not exist, I assume?
maybe along the development in metal you try some new stuff that you would not have tried otherwise and maybe this leads to interesting new things.
curious to see how you will approach rhino-rendering for macos/metal. I guess cycles is not an option there because this needs either openCL or cuda and none is available natively in future macos/metal? unless blender will port cycles to run natively on metal, that would be nice.

OpenGL was that graphics language common to both platforms.
That’s the rub.

It’s been hard enough trying to keep Windows and Mac display the same.
It will be even harder now.

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well, I guess the answer to that is that you will just have to hire a few more devs. GROW?!

I have no numbers but I assume investing in the apple plattform will pay off.

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Not really; it’s the same amount of work. Vulkan is not OpenGL and is not compatible with OpenGL. A display engine based on Vulkan would be just as much work as creating a new display engine based on Metal.

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interesting, thanks.

as long as your mac user base steadily grows (I would assume so) I think it will be worth the additional work? future will tell.

It’s not an option.
Apple is abandoning OpenGL.

sure, I meant the metal way will turn out to be worth the extra work.