Would like to gather some thoughts/ experience on whether anyone has modelled on Rhino using their Apple Silicon MBPs and how’s your experience so far? Have read some threads and it seems to be working fine with the latest Mac version and Rhino 7.5 and later. I mainly work with Rhino and Keyshot with occasional dabbling in the Adobe suite (Ps, Lr, Ai, Ae, Pr)**.
Aside from that I’m really quite a minimalist user, I close all unnecessary tabs when browsing and don’t download stuff unless necessary. I also don’t run multiple programs as much as possible. On rare occasions, a max workload would look something like this: (Spotify, 2-3 chrome tabs, Rhino (1GB file perhaps?), telegram, whatsapp, Zoom/teams, 1-2 powerpoints max)
I’m also in a dilemma right now between getting:
14" M2 Max (12 core CPU, 30-core GPU)
14" M2 Pro (12 core CPU, 19-core GPU)
In both cases I’ll likely get the 32GB ram to future-proof.
Also wondering if it’s worth it to upgrade to 1TB SSD as I already have multiple 2TB hard disks lying around since the M1s use swap memory. I also have unlimited cloud storage.
As of now, my biggest question is whether the Max model would have longevity issues due to thermal throttling which I’ve seen in some youtube videos. Otherwise it seems like a no-brainer to go for the Max since it’s only 5-10% more in terms of cost. I do plan to use this for at least 5-7 years so longevity is a primary concern.
Small update, I’ve decided that Max is likely not I will go for due to the fact that neither Rhino nor Keyshot supports GPU on Apple Silicon. Even if they do in the future, I don’t think it will be worth the worse battery life and thermals.
You might want to be more specific in your question. For displaying in the viewports, of course Rhino (both Rhino 7 and Rhino 8) uses the GPU on an Apple Silicon machine.
If you are wondering about rendering, we are currently working on CyclesX, that will take full advantage of the GPU on those Macs… We believe this will be in V8 at some point.
-wim
@DJS
That is correct.
Apple never supported the OpenGL tools needed for GPU rendering.
For V8, we hope to get GPU rendering under Metal. I doubt it will make initial release.
If you need high performance GPU rendering now in V7, you need to be running under Windows and be using an Nvidia GPU with lots of VRAM and CUDA cores.
Just to clarify as well, I decided to forego the Max chip and I didn’t think that it was worth it to splash out the cash for a 30-core GPU when both programs I would be using a lot (Rhino and Keyshot) won’t be able to fully utilize them - at least for now.