Does a better GPU help?

Rhino Windows Hardware
1

Hey everyone,
So one of my guilty pleasures while working in Rhino is to take a break and render out a nice progress shot. This rendering does take some time, and I’d like to speed it up a bit. Also now that my projects are getting a bit bigger, I noticed a bit of slowdown while moving around the 3D view and wouldn’t mind addressing that as well.

I’m using Rhino 6 with an Intel Core i5-8400 Coffee Lake 6-Core 2.8 GHz and just using it’s onboard graphics (UHD 630 IGP). I’m looking at second hand graphics cards around $80 - Nvidia 950 GTX or AMD R7 370. I know there’s a lot better cards out there, but thought I could get some bang for the buck with a bit of money that I can afford at this time.

Will I see faster render times in Rhino 6 if I add a graphics card? Also is there any big difference between the R7 and 950 in terms of compatibility with Rhino?

2

The basic V6 Rhino renderer is CPU-only. V7’s uses Cycles and supports GPUs. The working display is all about your video card’s OpenGL support, which on your current graphics is terrible.

Get the best GTX you can afford, but literally anything will be better than Intel integrated.

3

I would recommend you to get at least GTX 960 4GB if you want to work at 4K. GTX 960 2GB is not powerful enough for a comfortable use at 4K. There are decent prices for 2nd hand GTX 1060 6GB (60-80 Euros), which is about twice as fast than GTX 960 4GB.

4

Thanks for the response Jim. Would the R7 also be an improvement vs. the Intel integrated graphics? Or are Radeon cards not really recommended for Rhino?

5

They work fine, you’d have to do some investigating to see which is the better OpenGL performer at a particular price point. Nvidia has no competition at the high end.

6

I’m confused, you are saying the renderer for V6 is CPU-only, but he should buy a video card, what am I missing? I’ve tried to sort out in the past if upgrading my video card will improve Rhino v6/GH performance, but no luck sorting it out, saw this thread thought here’s my answer but I’m still confused.

7

The V6 basic built-in renderer is CPU-only, but improving the OpenGl display is worth a video upgrade from integrated video anyway.

8

Thanks for the help everyone,
I ended up finding a used Quadro M2000 with 4GB of RAM and Rhino is noticeably faster - Especially the ray-tracing mode, which I now use for renders instead of the separate rendering engine. The ray-tracing renders take about 5-6 minutes, which is a lot better than the 30-45 minute wait time I had before.