Can anyone offer a clear assessment of the experience using Rhino on a professional Apple silicon spec with a professional workload?
Ideally, one of the newest M3 setups.
What is the general experience like?
Is the problem with increasing memory lag still an issue?
Are there memory allocation issues with large files being worked on over long durations?
Are there issues with having multiple files open at the same time?
Are there weird quarks only found in the Mac environment?
Would you consider the experience reliable and stable for professional work?
I’ve been wanting to make this change for at least 5 years.
I know I’m not the only one. Are we there yet or should we shelve the desire?
I would love to hear honest insights from the guys at Mcneel as well, I beleive you guys should have the most experience with what meets expectations and what still needs development work.
Thank you anyone who contributes for your time and insights.
The community needs your insight.
Just wanted to come back and give a brief summary of where I ended up.
I did a direct comparison with the top of the line PC laptop & MacBook Pro 14" M3-Max w/ 64GB memory
I purchased the $5k (at the time) MSI Creators laptop
I was super excited for it because it was quite beautiful for a PC and all the specs were top tier. About an hour after opening I realized how big and heavy it was… still beautiful… I plugged it in and charged it to full charge. That night I put it through its paces as a laptop doing some web browsing, YouTube, etc. and noticed the battery was dropping quite fast. it lasted about 2 and a half hours from a full charge… I felt a bit sick in my gut knowing I needed much longer battery life for my work lifestyle and decided to buy the MacBook Pro that night for direct comparison.
I got it delivered the next day. set up my software on both computers and continued to do comparisons. The MacBook blew away the MSI in overall experience. The ONLY area the MSI was better was in raw rendering speed, which in my case is only about 10% of my overall work time. otherwise, it was clunky, loud, hot as hell and just not practical to travel around with. Meanwhile the MacBook lasts for at least 6 hours and many times longer working in cad and doing my daily work.
and Rhino for MAC is finally equivalent… after 12 years of waiting … a big THANK YOU to all of those who worked hard to make this happen.
obviously since you are not a mac user that is quite a biased statement, but i understand your sentiment since there is some truth there. what we are missing in your swift but incomplete picture though is that on the low side of the specs like entry level macbook air there is nothing that beats the value definitely no pc laptop ever. if you start specking out your higher end macs then we can start talking about the price monopoly apple is hanging up there with like a ripe fruit that just wont come down from its tree. but then again and yes that is one of the most quoted cliche arguments ever but still true, macs offer much more than good hardware, and i am not talking about the mostly sleek design but how integrated the entire system and hardware is, making you daily computing far less troubled than i ever experienced with any pc. does it make it equal in value now to pc? idk, but there are these parts to the story that are all too often forgotten when grooming new pc users instead of being fair.
i am not seeing that, my v7 still blows v8 out of the water in simple viewport navigation. the only thing that has picked up a bit is rendering, which i believe is due to the new cycles x core much rather than any other doings from McNeel.
then something is wrong with your v8. if you are running on a silicon mac, v8 should run circles (and does here in all of our testing) as it runs native on metal and the silicon architecture.
v7 is emulated on silicon macs as it came out before the metal architecture was developed.
happy to try and get to the bottom of that with your set up if you’d like. send us your systeminfo to tech@mcneel.com and we’ll pick that issue up there.
Incorrect assumption. And you ignored the qualifier I used which was “Typically”
I use both platforms extensively, and daily. However it is a true statement I personally prefer the PC for Rhino for reasons too numerous to list here but the two main are Plugins and Rendering speed.
We generally suggest folks stay away from Macbook Air machines for Rhino the same as we recommend staying away from intel HD machines on the pc side. The mac book pro or the studio machines are a better choice but even fully specd will still be flat out embarrassed in most performance metrics by a less powerful PC with a mid level nvidia RTX card. Agree or not, I stand by my statement in reference to a machine built for running Rhino, objectively PC is better/faster/ and cheaper and has a much larger plug in support base.
For Adobe products, I prefer the Mac for just about all of them.
We have plenty of mac zealots here, Brian Gillespie one of our dev leads is a 100% mac user, as is Dan, Brian J is majority mac etc. I simply go where the speed is. When the mac is faster, I’ll go there without hesitation.
since i am not developing any of it i must say something is wrong with your v8, no i did not take part in screwing up any of it. but that is the main issue in not getting ahead, in stead of listening to the user they are blamed and ridiculed, or ghosted like in many cases.
spreading further misconceptions. the macbook air is in no way not powerful enough to run rhino, proving that the concept of what apple silicon is about found no understanding.and no dont give me that bad for rendering excuse, that is not the main thing people do on Rhino. defintely they would use some completely different app for it then which actually allows you to render well, since metal is still not properly integrated on Rhino.
also comparing a hightech computer with an outdated embarrassing hardware like intel hd, you knocked yourself way out here.
none of which use rhino to actively work with. hope they spend their time much rather improving it.
The problem with the 185H, is being the Intel Meteor Lake. Really, this was a rather beta platform that was late anyway; and mostly seemed to be just a demonstrator/public beta for chiplet CPUs at Intel.
My MSI laptop with Intel Skylake 6700HQ ran Rhino 7 fine, with a GTX 970M!
One would think that the appropriate modern comparisons will come from Arrow Lake V (Intel) and Strix (AMD) on the higher end; but I see no reason why an Intel Lunar Lake thin & light wouldn’t run Rhino viewport fine.
In addition, at least with Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake (if you must have Intel for mobile); you should get at least Alchemist iGPUs, which are vastly superior in capability to UHD/Iris Xe. I think Meteor Lake had a bit of a mixed bag.
At the risk of jumping into the fray here - I think it’s worth pointing out that on this specific point - there is a perspective where this is by no means an unalloyed good.
Pervasive vertical integration, while it may (in the best of cases) produce a more seamless user experience and allow manufacturers to impose better coherence overall - also has costs to the users in terms of variety of choices, monetary goods costs and an environment that fosters development of a diverse ecosystem of technologies. Just saying - for myself, (also as a user of many different tech platforms in work and private life) - that I find that I’ll often prefer a less narrowly suitable technology when I can see the broader benefits in terms of the systemic effects that are attendant in certain architectural and policy level choices. In other words, sometimes second best is better - when all the angles are considered.
That said, reading the news recently am glad to see it appears we’re moving into an era where platform monopolies are being countered more directly at the legislative level - so this may be of diminishing relevance as time goes on.
while i can not disagree since i have not enough information to follow your perspective, maybe you could explain what you would change in matter of hardware if you could choose?
ok, if it leads to a healthy competition with more humane prices (without the cheap labour work that makes people rich on only one side of the planet)
a few years ago just before the rumours started about apple producing their own chips i was haunted by hot loud computers because intel made their processors so dam dumb that the world probably suffered some energy crisis just because of them in all these millions of computers out there (no joke) having a chip that sucks way less power than its hot devilish counterparts making not only for a more energy sustainable environment but also for a far less noisy one is all what i needed here. at this point computer tech has caught up so far that its doing all the stuff which you usually do on a computer in a breeze even with the weakest of entities. it is for me not so much about the highest available performance, but about computers that allow you to work and enjoy working.
when i worked with pc still in the late 90s i was still all about these fancy gadgets this and that graphic card, tearing apart your computer to reassemble it having fun while doing it, those where the little boys hobbies and fully ok at that time, but i have grown older more mature hopefully, i wish to leave all these messings behind and spend more time with family, friends and myself rather than sticking my head down that dark rabbit hole that does only one thing really sufficiently, to pull time from your precious moments you would be allowed to enjoy otherwise.
Hard agree on that point - something that I’ve directly experienced working with overseas contract manufacturer’s is that the “cheap labor” equation is a rapidly changing one. Places where the cheap labor existed a decade ago are now themselves outsourcing to other places, having achieved more middle-class conditions themselves. Definitely an ever-evolving situation - would propose avoiding disposable approaches and a willingness to pay what things are worth is a good general tactic here.
On the Intel/x86 front - I definitely suspect that the future is ARM and/or possibly RISC-V. Intel really did get themselves in a pickle with some of the thermal shutdown issues on the latest processors. Personally I pick lower powered processors for anything mobile - the middle ground is vastly suffieicent and I also can’'t stand fans running all the time. For workstations though - I’ve tended to go the Xeon route - finding off-lease deals of “last-years-models” that deliver considerable power for pennies and are built for big-budget companies that need reliability. Have found this can deliver systems that run for 8-10 years before needing to upgrade.
That said - coming from an IT and hardware development background - my needs include supporting a lot of older tech using sometimes obscure interfaces.
Because of the peculiar conditions that arose in the IBM derived PC market, (with a heterogeneous software/hardware vendor landscape), coupled with the demands of vast business deployments - there is chain of backward compatibility continuity into the technological past that I highly doubt would exist otherwise. This is the main effect that I’m thinking of here :
I get into audio control systems at work and some electronic music production on the side - the Microsoft environment is objectively worse with its support for many audio features, particularly MIDI - which is severely limited there. And yet, there are many (self included) who still choose to use the Windows OS for music - particularly for when it comes to running older software or supporting older hardware interfaces. But at the office we mainly use Apple systems to debug the hardware data streams for devices because it is way more plug-an-play. And all software development focus targets crossplatform package builders now, just to keep everyone relatively sane from the get-go.
So getting back to Rhino - it strikes me that in some ways Rhino has achieved a unique and possibly unparalleled and hopefully sustainable balance that delivers a lot of what had been promised by the free software movement - in terms of providing an interface that is highly user customizable, scriptable, has interoperability with other software via OpenNURBS, is very engaged with community input, is affordable to pros, students and serious private users alike. The principle of adversarial interoperability is embraced here in a way that is uncommonly refreshing.
It’s fantastic that Rhino is being developed in a way that affords it running on different systems - I think that generally speaking (I feel this is generally true for technology systems) - this very pressure, to become more vendor agnostic - (while there are inevitably going to be bumps along the way) - is one that in the end is highly beneficial.