Improving Render Speed Rhino 7

I’m working with the v7 trial on a Mac, and what renders in 6 seconds on my PC is taking 2 minutes on the Mac. The following are specs:

4.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
24 GB RAM
Radeon Pro 580: 8 GB VRAM
512 GB Flash Drive

My PC laptop has the following:
Intel Xenon CPU 3. GHz
16 GB RAM
NVIDIA Quadro M5000M (not M500M)
512 GB SSD

Any thoughts on why this would be? Any way to speed up the Mac renders?

Thank you!

I bet that Options > Cycles in Rhino 7 for Windows is set to use the Nvidia GPU in your PC but on the Mac you are using the CPU (Preferences > Cycles). Make sure your pixel count is the same in the Rendering panel in Rhino 7 on both Mac and Windows for a fair comparison too.

If my guess is right, run the PackageManager command in Rhino 7 for Mac and install the Intel Denoiser. Then when you render you can apply a denoiser post effect so you don’t have to get to as many samples. You have to restart Rhino 7 for this to load as well.

Thank you for the response Brian.

That is the case with the setting, but there is no option for the Mac GPU in Preferences>Cycles–was poking around last night. Pixel count was the same when I tested, yes. Will try the denoiser, but wondering if there’s a reason why the only option is CPU–is this card not supported?

Thanks!

Brian, can you tell me why I’d be installing the Intel denoiser rather than the AMD denoiser?

Also, apparently the team wasn’t able to get GPU rendering to work with v7, so it’s CPU all the way, hence slower.

@BrianJ, I remember some time ago there was talk about implementing something like the Radeon ProRenderer, which is already supported in Blender?
The performance of the Radeon ProRenderer is great, even on older hardware, like my 2016 MacBook Pro! It renders to a medium quality image, some noise but otherwise clear in a matter of seconds.
Are you still working on that or have you given up, because Apple is probably moving to their custom GPUs, even on the pro-line?
It would be a nice feature for AMD GPU users on Windows though, wouldn’t it?

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Interesting! Could I import my models into Blender to render with the Mac GPU then? Is the Blender render engine equivalent to the render quality in v7? Thank you!

It’s the same engine while Rhino implementation is more simplified (in terms of UI ofc as original is based on nodes - can take a while to understand how those works) and not fully utilized yet.

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Yes, you can export 3D models from Rhino to Blender and the render quality is much better, even with Eevee or Cycles. Blender is used a lot in the film and animation industry. It’s render tools are thus much better developed! Rhino didn’t even have a renderer to take seriously before version 6 and the introduction of Cycles.

For quick renders I usually use Keyshot, because it’s very streamlined and easy to use, whilst producing great results. If I want to be more specific and have some time, I usually setup a nice scene in Blender with HDR lighting, nice materials, even effects like fog, etc…

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Oh, and Blender also let’s you post-process renderings in its Compositor, which by itself is a super powerful tool. You can pretty much get rid of Photoshop! It does filters, denoising, color and light correction, etc.

And yes, you can do GPU rendering on macOS, but only with Radeon renderer! Cycles and Eevee are CPU-based I believe, but also work great! Cylces works better than in Rhino in my experience.

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Cool, thank you for all the good info! I’m a PC user and the v7 render engine for Windows is producing surprisingly good results and is super fast (I use V-Ray normally), but I’m training some teams that insist upon using Mac, so have been looking at both Keyshot and Maxwell as workflow options. This is a wildcard! No Photoshop! Ha.

It is still in progress. We hope to see it soon.

Andy

OpenCL is what AMD cards can use for GPU acceleration but in my experience using GPU renderers I’ve always used Nvidia and Cuda. My understanding is that the AMD card model and it’s driver determine the support for this ability so yes, if Rhino Render 7 (Cycles) doesn’t see it as an option, you won’t be able to use it.

You can try both, I use the Intel one even with an Nvidia card as I found it was less likely to cause an issue if I also used the GPU for the raytracing. It works the same on any machine too so it’s a good bet to suggest it despite hardware.

Hey Guys,

I’ve been using Rhino on windows for some time but I am now looking in to a switch onto mac to improve workflow between myself and my small team. Im testing Rhino 7 and crucially need to be able to make simple render outputs to take shadow layers for use in collage style architectural renders.

Rhino 7 seems to work great APART from the the render speeds I am currently experiencing which seem extremely slow. My question is whether my machine is just not powerful enough (we might upgrade to more punchy I macs) or whether the functionality just isn’t there yet. My macbook pro is fairly new and I thought fairly powerful. But I am not so computer literate so the ‘CPU, GPU’ jargon above is a little hard for me to understand!

Any help much appreciated. Hoping we can find a way to stick on Mac as its great for everything else we do!

My existing setup is as follows:

Rhino 7 SR4 2021-3-10 (Rhino 7, 7.4.21069.13332, Git hash:master @ ccae1fd90d6c89471214a11230dcb924a2d1ed87)
License type: Evaluation, build 2021-03-10
License details: Cloud Zoo
Expires on: 4446298-06-11

Apple Intel 64-bit macOS Version 10.15.5 (Build 19F101) (Physical RAM: 16Gb)
Mac Model Identifier: MacBookPro15,1
Language: en-CH (MacOS default)

AMD Radeon Pro 560X OpenGL Engine (OpenGL ver:4.1 ATI-3.9.15)

OpenGL Settings
Safe mode: Off
Use accelerated hardware modes: On
Redraw scene when viewports are exposed: On

Anti-alias mode: 4x
Mip Map Filtering: Linear
Anisotropic Filtering Mode: High

Vendor Name: ATI Technologies Inc.
Render version: 4.1
Shading Language: 4.10
Maximum Texture size: 16384 x 16384
Z-Buffer depth: n/a
Maximum Viewport size: 16384 x 16384
Total Video Memory: 4 GB
Graphics: Radeon Pro 560X
Displays: Color LCD (258dpi 2x)

Graphics processors
Intel UHD Graphics 630 (1536 MB)
Radeon Pro 560X (4 GB)
Color LCD (1680 x 1050)

USB devices
Apple Inc.: Touch Bar Backlight
Apple Inc.: Touch Bar Display
Apple Inc.: Apple Internal Keyboard / Trackpad
Apple: Headset
Apple Inc.: Ambient Light Sensor
Apple Inc.: FaceTime HD Camera (Built-in)
Apple Inc.: Apple T2 Controller

Can you render a sky in Rhino 7 similar to V-ray?

You might try the “ProRender” plugin in the PackageManager command instead for rendering. I think it will run on your AMD GPU. The CPU is all that Rhino 7 for Mac can use for rendering otherwise and this can be slow depending on the scene, materials, lighting, pixel size of the render and the sample rate you are trying to get to. Another plugin in the PackageManager command to try is called “Intel Denoiser”… this will let you remove grain from the render as a post effect but you’ll still want to get to 150-250 samples.

Yes but it won’t be exactly like Vray… create a new basic environment in the Environments panel and then add a Physical Sky texture to it. Set that env. as the backdrop in the Rendering panel.

Hello, I am struggling with very slow rendering times with R7, even with lowest quality and minimal samples, it’s taking ages – for very simple models e.g. a chair.

I have tried the above suggestions, but ProRender leads to a spinning ball, and the denoiser is not supported.

Is it my computer specs that are letting me down, or are there other settings/installs I could try?

I have a new iMac running macOS Big Sur:
P: 3.6 GHz 10-Core Intel Core i9
M: 64 GB 2667 MHz DDR4
G: AMD Radeon Pro 5700 8 GB

Thank you for your time!

Hi,

The Intel Denoiser found by searching with the PackageManager command should work on any CPU. You need to restart Rhino after installing it to see it as a post effect.

What version of Rhino 7 for Mac are you using… try the 7.5 Service Release Candidate in Preferences > General.

Thank you very much Brian for the reply and help. I upgraded to 7.5 service release and tried again with Intel denoiser (inadvertently had other one that was mentioned earlier in this thread).

For a 640x480 render / render preview with 15 samples, the render time is 23.98s - seemingly no difference with the denoiser off.

You probably gathered, but I am beginner with Rhino – but is that a render time to be expected / within normal parameters? I likely have some other setting not tuned correctly here.

I attach screenshots of what is being tested…

Many thanks!

Judging rendering times with any program is dependent on many variables. Render settings, materials, render meshes, lights, image resolution and the geometry itself for instance are all factors. The denoisers will not make the render run faster but they instead as a post process smooth out grain in the image so you don’t have to get to as high a sample count. Generally, 100 samples is good for most scenes to use the denoisers. If you have fine details or textures in the model, you’ll need to go higher though ~300 or so to keep those pixels plus remove grain.

Your screenshot looks like a capture of the Rendered display mode not the results of the Render command too. Post a 3dm model all set up to just run the Render command if you want comparisons. Maybe post in a new thread too. You could try resetting the Rendering settings to defaults but I’m just guessing without a file.