MacOS on M1 Max: V7 vs. V8 vs. Parallels - Tests and Conclusion

Rhino Rhino for Mac
,
1

I recently got a Macbook pro M1 Max/32 and started to compare the performance between macOS Rhino7 / WIP 8 and Windows 11 ARM Rhino 7 / WIP 8. Also built the same simple scene in blender (mac and parallels)

Here are my impressions - it might help someone to decide between mac/win:

The scene is simple; box array with 1000 default spheres, each one surface, about 8k vertices / faces.
So in total 1000 objects and 8 Mil Triangles/Quads.

macOS:
Rhino 7: barley useable, feels like 10 fps.
Rhino 8 WIP: barley useable with default OpenGL. ‘TestMetal’ improves the situation, but it is very fill-rate dependent - once you cover the view with the scene it degrades down to maybe 15 fps.

Parallels with Windows 11: (running at half-resolution)
Rhino 7: somewhat useable
Rhino 8 WIP: somewhat useable, actually comparable to macOS WIP.

EDIT / Update:
After more investigation i can say V7 (Parallels) is quite useable for smaller files - even better than R7 Mac. It strongly depends on the object count and fill-rate. Rhino is quite bad (always was, also in native windows) at high object counts. It easily displays 10 meshes with 1M tris each. I still suspect the aggressive always-on occlusion culling which hinders good draw call batching - but thats just my guess…

Now that all sounds quite bad, and you might ask ‘what is my reference point?’. It is blender. The same base mesh sphere exported as obj, into blender, arrayed as 1000 duplicates (separate Objects) runs at perceived 120 fps - in macOS and even in Parallels W11.
Granted, in Parallels there are long delays when creating geometry in blender, but navigation and transformation of objects if fast.

My personal conclusion is this: The mac team worked now for some years on the Mac version of Rhino without any substantial improvement in sight. I don’t know the people working on this and don’t want to blame or insult anyone - but I think without getting some very qualified people that specialise in this area + the willingness of mcNeel to reevaluate the whole UI / UX / Viewport system, this is going nowhere.

As i always say here, the Rhino geometry core and API is beautiful to work with and very well made, but the whole program built on top is rotten in macOS and Windows

1 Like
2

Lots of problems and confusion here.

Rhino 7 is compiled for Intel CPU Macs.
It runs just fine on my 2 Intel CPU Macs with AMD gpus.

Apple provides “Rosetta” as a translation layer for running Intel software on SIlicon Macs. It’s slow and the OpenGL is pretty buggy.

V8 will be binay compatible with Silicon processor Macs and will use their new Metal display tools. We still have a lot of development work to do.

Parallels is not supported period.

Sorry you didn’t hear about this a long time ago.

3

I do understand and follow the development here since many years.
Blender Intel runs just fine on M1 with Rosetta. Yes, there are some delays with memory access, but the viewport is fluid!

M1 came out in November 2020… its 2023 now - and that is part of my point: things move too slow compared to other software packages.

The performance of parallels is just a data point - its not about supporting it, it shows (together with macOS) that the whole viewport approach is not working very well.

1 Like