Does Rhino 7 work fine on MacBook M3 Pro chip?

Considering buying a new Mac with the Apple silicon chip from a Mac intel i7 chip. Just wanted to confirm that Rhino 7 will work as normal

it performs pretty good on an m1 ultra, would not think it can be much worse on an m3

I would get the native R8

1 Like

Good to know. cheers

Thanks you, I just needed to know if itā€™s compatible.

But how much would it cost to upgrade?

Please just do some basic ā€œresearchā€ and got to http://rhino3d.com/ before posting everything into the forum :smiley:

no rhino 7 sucks on any Macā€¦ rhino 8 is amazing its worth the upgrade cost on apple silicon.

Posting here for my take on this. Have waited couple of years before finally giving in to Mac silicon as my intel Mac book made me want to smash it. As it was like wading through treacle (in a large rhino file). So I Iā€™m also coming from an iMac Pro 10core intel which is pretty good still to be fair but the i7 laptop was a pain. The m3 pro 12 core is absolutely a proper upgrade from both. For adobe apps unbelievable so fast, illustrator finally quick even with huge images placed and indd fantastic. So I then got rhino 8 installed and it is a total mess (ymmv). Spinning beach balls, wrecks any old files (make backups as it breaks anything you open - in that it wonā€™t open in 7 after you try it in 8 - was so gutted as Iā€™ve waited 2 years for this but tried out v7 and it flys! Way faster than on my iMac Pro and works like a dream. Such a relief and saved the v8 upgrade until they make it work properly.

Hi Dan-

(Fellow Dan here). This is really disappointing to hear. If you have the patience to try again, Iā€™d be curious what happens - with files you have backups of, of course - if you disabled macOS Autosave and Versions in Rhino 8. You can do this with TestToggleMacAutosaveVersions, then restart Rhino 8 for Mac.

It sounds like you have other issues, but this is the most concerning to me and Iā€™d like to see if, in your case, this is due to Autosave and Versions.

-Dan

Hi Dan,

I appreciate you offering advice to help sort this out - have been surprised to see so many people reporting it working on M Series chips as it was just so far from working correctly for me - on a fresh Mac with no plugins or fonts or anything much installed.

Iā€™m not looking to cause trouble, I absolutely love rhino, and have literally spent the last few years hanging onto Intel Macs despite knowing Mac silicon would help every other aspect of my work, even buying a new (old) Intel iMac, and intel laptop as it was the only upgrades that still let me use rhino - after trying rhino 8 on an m1 and finding it was totally not ready for action.

if you want to remove my comment, or you need me to / edit it please let me know. I want rhino to be a success and maybe should have waited to post.
I was super frustrated yesterday as Iā€™m fairly broke, but plunked down for new laptop after a hard few days work with a slow laptop, the investment seemed to be perfect with every app until I installed V8 rhino which was just an unmitigated disaster.

1 I couldnā€™t even get a trial installed as Iā€™ve tried it already in the past, and then 2 after a work around it was just a complete failure of spinning beach ball, broken files and unable to change display modes, etc. exactly what Iā€™ve found previously on iMac and i7 macbook pro laptop.

Admittedly the files I was trying are very large (my other gripe you may have see me on the forums asking for help with - which your command about autosave may help with) but these are the files Iā€™m working with regularly so they are what I need to work.

I reluctantly gave in and just tried a few totally empty files with some cubes, same terrible jaggy jumpy performance etc.

Iā€™ve had another quick test today after receiving a message from Guillermo Varela - this time with the file Iā€™ve had to do some working in to ā€˜fixā€™ in v7, (which doesnā€™t seem to like replacing missing maps). This file did work much better, to the point Iā€™m now querying whether there was an issue yesterday that doesnā€™t write off V8 for me.

Maybe the new Mac was still spotlight indexing or something?, but it was just super dissapointing, as everything else is such a massive upgrade - the first time in 30 years of buying Macs when one actually felt like the upgrade they promise in a keynote.
But I had a terrible realisation that I may not be able to stick with rhino if I canā€™t get it working.

Iā€™ll try to put some more time into V8 and your suggestion and see if it can work or not, and will post the issues directly to Guillermo to see if there is anything that can be mitigated.

Iā€™m hoping the auto save cancel feature can help with my other issue which is the slow down every few minutes with 5-6gb files saving constantly. - I know this may be OSX as well as rhino acting on this.

Thanks again

Dan

You need not remove any comment. I read nothing but justified frustration.

It sounds like youā€™re having lots of issues and Iā€™d just like to take one at a time for the moment, so Iā€™d definitely appreciate you testing with Autosave and Versions disabledā€¦if you can muster the patience, that is. It sounds frustrating. If we can isolate that particular issue first - corrupt files are a priority issue for us - we can move onto the next issue.

-Dan

Hi so ā€˜Corruptā€™ files is maybe not totally accurate term. the files open in V8 and have errors, some faces moved and items were broken in the scene, the work is unsable in V8 due to performance (and some issues with materials and maps), then the file is baked as V8 due to drop box more than rhinos autosave it seems.

So regardless of turning off auto save in rhino, drop box and osx are endlessly uploading and resaving the file as you go. So even if you say ā€˜do not saveā€™ in rhino and revert to previous etc when you close the file. It now says ā€œThe model named ā€¦ was created by Rhino 8. This model cannot be read by Rhino 7. for inromation visit rhino3d.com etcā€

  • although I tried again yesterday and it let me use versions to get back to a scene in the original state. so maybe that is working as expected?
    Drop box seems to be causing the main issue with the file being overwritten.

As a result of having installed v8, my Mac instantly wants to open any .3dm file in v8. As most of my files are in drop box, when you double click a file to initiate download it then opens in the default program v8 and caused this issue. so you have to manually change the defualt opening back to V7 for .3dm files.

Pausing drop box stops this issue. But v8 still seems like itā€™s not working properly for me. Iā€™ll test more previous work files and see if there is a common issue with scene content.

The video below is clunky one hand recording. But you can see the same file in v8 and v7 so you can see why Iā€™m thinking v8 is unusable and v7 is pretty great.