Canvas speed

[Gijs (Gijs de Zwart)]

I tested canvas speed the other day on a MacBook Pro 16” i9 with Radeon 5500 4Gb and noticed that even on that machine the canvas feels sluggish. If I test the canvas redraw speed with the built in tool of gh, it mentions a ridiculously high framerate (172)
But panning through the document feels more like 10 frames/second.
Does it use the graphics card at all? Will it be better in gh2?

[rudolf.neumerkel (Rudi)]

@Gijs, this topic is near and dear to my heart. The recent update to RH7 and I believe the SR RH6.30 bring some improvements to the situation (and the Canvas redraw speed counter works now!). Check out this thread for more info:

Slow canvas UI (with multiple elements)

@curtisw, @dan thanks a lot for your effort guys! You are amazing. I tried out the newest improvements and did some comparisons myself. 6.29.20239.15172 vs. 7.0.20266.16016 running on macOS 10.15.6 Here is my experience: Canvas frame rate seems to have increased about 2x (This was measured by video recording the two versions and counting frames). And one can really feel the difference, when zooming and panning around! The speed of resizing empty GH windows has increased significantly a…

That being said, I don’t think the GH interface makes great use of the available computing power. The recent update has improved things a lot, but we still have some way to go. I really hope GH2 will change this situation, as it will be built using different technologies:

Small review and wish list for Rhino for Mac

The performance hit is due to the translation from System.Drawing to Core Graphics (macOS’s graphics API). It comes down to the following: Translating from System.Drawing API’s to Core Graphics has overhead, and with so many elements on the screen it adds up. System.Drawing has features that are slow to do in the same way in Core Graphics. We have our own custom System.Drawing implementation that maps to CoreGraphics which is very slow since we emulate the System.Drawing API On Windows there…

Hope this helps!

Cheers

[rodwyll (robin_gdwl)]

@rudolf.neumerkel I also struggle with the sluggishness of GH on Mac, Thanks for your answer.

You mentioned GH2 - Is there any ETA on when that may be released? Will it shop with Rhino7? Also how backwards compatible are Grasshopper definitions made in Rhino7 when opening with Rhino 6 in practice?

[DavidRutten]

@rodwyll

You mentioned GH2 - Is there any ETA on when that may be released?

It’s been a long few years already. I hesitate to make another prediction. Good news is that lately the progress has been more tangible.

@rodwyll

Will it sh[i]p with Rhino7?

It will initially be available as a Yak package for whatever the current Rhino version is. I have high hopes gh2 alpha will be available before we start selling Rhino 8.

@rodwyll

Also how backwards compatible are Grasshopper definitions made in Rhino7 when opening with Rhino 6 in practice?

Provided you don’t use one of the Rhino7-only components, entirely compatible. If you do, entirely not.

Sadly we did not keep a clean list of which components are available in Rhino 7 only.

[rudolf.neumerkel (Rudi)]

@rodwyll

I also struggle with the sluggishness of GH on Mac, Thanks for your answer.

Hope the update helped a bit!

@DavidRutten

I have high hopes gh2 alpha will be available before we start selling Rhino 8.

Sounds great sir! Good luck

Hopefully you guys can find a good cross platform solution for the Win/Mac Grasshopper Canvas/Interface for GH2. Some more fps gainz on the GH-Mac side would very sweet!

(btw: is there a collection/list of planned features for GH2, other than your YouTube Video updates?)