Apple Silicon and Rhino: The practicable?

My macbook is nearing the end of its life. I was wondering how well the ARM Macbooks do with Rhino from a practicable perspective. Are people finding it works better? Worse? The same? Any real life issues? Advise on picking a machine? Should I hold off as long as possible? Wait for a native Rhino version?

What are people finding in the real world?

Rhino 7 works with Silicon based Macs, but unfortunately the OpenGL drivers in the new Macs are not performing as well as the previous Intel based models. We are trying to work with Apple to have them fix bugs with their OpenGL drivers as well as making changes to Rhino 7 to work around issues as they come up.

If you are using Rhino 7, you do have access to the Rhino 8 WIP. For Rhino 8, we will be shipping a silicon based version of Rhino as well as use metal as a display technology.

Being in a similar situation as @miano [MBP late 2013 and considering whether to wait or invest soon in the Max 16’]
current old machine works well, but not really useable with Raytrace and too slow to render.

Reading all the threads about the current issues with the M1, and the developments in the WIP… I do not recall seening any one addressing
How these machine preform now with Raytrace and Render ? and how are they expected to preform in R8 compare to the GPU based Raytrace/render in Windows?

thanks a lot
Akash

We don’t have anything to show yet which is why we aren’t really discussing these topics. Nathan is working on an update to cycles for Rhino 8 which is what raytrace and render both use. This update will include usage of the GPU on Mac which should show dramatic performance improvements. Again, we haven’t gotten there so this is still only speculation.

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The answer appears to be “hold off for now if you can.”

Just as an idea: Go to an Apple store, get a chair, install Rhino 8 on a M1 machine and send your files to that machine via AirDrop. Works as long as you open Rhino without moving it into the applications folder.
(I am assuming that Rhino performs the same if it is opening directly from an image as when it is moved to the applications folder, might not be true IDK)
In this way you should be able to answer most of your questions. I did that a few weeks ago, will probably do some testing again.

p.s.: I did that 1h before the store closed, so there weren’t too people and there were some other MacBooks left to try out, so I guess no one was really pissed at me sitting there for some time haha

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I have a 16" Macbook Pro Max with 64gb Ram.
Rhino 7 has worked flawlessly so far, (not one single crash).
Viewport performance is solid – zooming and panning is supersmooth, with no artefacts.
Raytraced mode and rendering is as unexciting as on a 2018 16" Intel MBP, with 5300M.

I will be happy to record test-files for anyone interested in Rhino 8 performance, after purchasing a licence.

are you using testmetal?

“Testmetal” is only available in Rhino 8.

ic, i did not read well, so you say that you have acceptable performance in rhino? that wonders me from what i read what people complain about.