since metal for mac os is quite a while out in the wild and its advantages rather obvious, i would like to know a few specifics how this is going to look like and when we could see an implementation of this on our screens. is it still going to happen for Rhino 6 or will we have to wait for Version 7?
I have seen @nathanletwory informing with a short note that this is targeted here but i did not find anything more elaborative… any words?
Looking at my crystal ball I’m targeting Rhino 8 for metal. We will be writing code in Rhino 7 that gets us prepped to switch over to metal as that in itself is a large task.
Thank you for the reply! Fair enough, it’s a shame that things have gone proprietary on the mac side but I am sure the benefits will be immense when they do arrive.
hi @stevebaer thanks for the fast response but oh my… i think that crystal ball needs a bit of a polish… 
or maybe its just playing a good one on us? 
i can understand that metal did not enter the version 5 anymore since that was basically done when it came out, still i hoped that the performance advantages would be severe enough to give this at least some sort of priority, making it a part of rhino 6. but not even having it in version 7 is rather very disappointing now.
i am guessing that the progress on version 7 has advanced enough to make it happen earlier than the gap between 5 and 6? i cant even guess how its going to happen for version 8, but maybe we have to start putting up a wish list for this already?
why is that?
Out of curiosity:
Why is that? From what I have seen Metal isn’t vastly faster than OpenGL, it just has more modern features, so what would your benefits be? IMO moving from a stable dinosaur to a new species will require a lot of coding, bug fixing and work to provide stability, which is paramount for professionals.
Our tracking system already has 6579 items for “Future” releases:
https://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issues?q=State:%20Unresolved%20Release%20target:%20Future
Open GL was never really the fastest horse in the stable and does not perform anywhere near the Windows performance. Not noticeable to the most but for gamers and professionals, even myself i am basically only talking out of read up experience. But from what i read is Metal supposed to be quite a bit faster, not just a little. Not having this speedier performance Apple has laid a path out for is surely not making anybody using a mac happy.
i sincerely hope not, but probably, but i dont know enough to nothing about the specifics to lead any discussion on that. from what i understood is that you are not using macs anyway or do you? if not why the interest?
yeah… that is a pretty rough but equally infinite schedule, could also mean Rhino 9-ty…
I use macs as well, but not for modelling because my workstation is vastly superior on large projects because of IFC plugins and handling of big files. And I would use my mac laptop for modelling if it could use all the tools I have on my windows side.
I am always interested in hardware and realtime use, but I am also a sucker for stability and ease of use so I can trust the setup when deadlines are getting close.
which other tools would you miss for example? not sure how advanced the rhino wip 7 for win is compared to wip 6 for mac in regards of subd but i thought there are some workable basics there to at least cover this in its current state.
i am personally missing plugins for GIS data visualisation in grasshopper like Gismo. i talked to the developer quite some time ago, and he said it will not be possible to port it to mac due to a part of it being written in c++ (if i did not mix that) which Rhino for mac does not substitute and since i have never found an alternative i am left to make it manually. (thankfully some cities, countries have that freely available at the cost of searching for it forever and downloading it)
What I meant by that was that OpenGL (a cross-platform standard) was deprecated in favour of Metal, which I assume is proprietary. I know Metal is much better on Apple hardware, but it does still seem a shame!
yes you are right, that actually is a shame…, its not clear why they actually did that, would involve a ton more research… 2 options arise in my mind thinking about it spontaneously -> marketing, or actual performance and no better way to gain it than to appropriate it accordingly which would make it less of a shame again. open gl has “only” 250 commands which as a number seems more or less over-viewable, rewriting that or lets say enhancing that to be better in line with Mac Os seem like an ok justification, leaving aside the fact that they are writing it for mac os only of course.
talks about how metal in mac with a configuration which is weaker is beating the crap out of all other pc laptops, at about 3.40