What is the status on metal ?
The speed is super promising as Rhino on the M1 mac is a sloooow experience.
But there are still a lot of graphic glitches with metal.
Metal should be a major priority in my opinion.
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Hi Morten -
Only a couple of our developers have the necessary background to be able to help in the implementation of Metal on macOS, and those people are constantly working on this.
The main focus so far has been to get it to work without crashing on all kinds of hardware. Just this week, a big chunk of code was merged that made it possible to have a shaded viewport on my old MacBook Air. That’s a big step.
There are still many things to implement and the obstacles are unknown. Optimization will come at the end of all that.
-wim
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Fantastic. But maybe Rhino 8 should focus purely on the new M1 chips.
Rhino 7 Mac runs pretty decently on Intel processors. In fact much more smooth than Rhino 7 on my Mac M1!
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Hi @wim
Any news on this?
I’m fearing that Rhino will go into another 10 year development phase before we have optimal performance on Mac ARM processors.
Like we saw with the initial MAC version of Rhino (for Intel processors) which was made semi-obsolete with the introduction of the Mac ARM processors.
Thanks.
Hi Morten -
There are no plans to make Rhino 8 for Mac run on Apple Silicon only.
-wim
then why haven’t you hired more already?
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I understand it is nice to have Rhino 8 compatible with older (out phazed) CPU’s a s well.
But for us who invested in the latest MAC’s and can hardly run Rhino 7 or 8 on those state-of-the art machines it seems like the priority is wrong.
It’s really a pain working with Rhino on Apple silicone. Very very slow.
It would speed up your development process if you let Rhino 7 be an Intel version and Rhino 8 be an Apple Silicone version.
So please take this into your consideration.
Thank you.
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If McNeel is not able to deliver M1 ready software that runs smoothly and is comparable to what other graphics programs are offering I think you need to either seriously upgrade your development team so you can keep up with Mac development, or admit defeat and concentrate on Windows only. I love my MacBook and the Apple ecosystem, but this laptop getting older every day and as I continue to read about users difficulties with running Rhino on M1 hardware, I keep putting off buying a badly needed replacement. I really hope you will chose the first option and hire the developers you need-your customers deserve software that takes advantage of the current state of hardware, not explanations and excuses.
I wasn’t expecting Rhino to be this small.
Rhino 8 will run on both x86-64 (Intel) and Silicon based processors. To only support Silicon would be a sales and technical support nightmare.
We are targeting metal as the default display technology on Rhino 8. It is easier to support a single display technology on all of our supported Mac computers than to double the work by having Rhino 8 start with Metal on by default on an M1 and OpenGL on by default on an Intel CPU. We are keeping OpenGL in Rhino 8 as a fallback, but it won’t get much attention beyond basic support.
We are not “staffing up” just to get through this initial large transition to metal. By the time we find and onboard graphics developers proficient in metal, we’ll be done with the bulk of the project. You are seeing the warts by being involved in the WIP process.
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What is your estimate for when you will have Rhino ready for reliable professional use on M1 Macs?
When we ship Rhino 8. We are not going to ship Rhino 8 with a half baked implementation of Metal.
We are pushing to try and be feature complete by the end of the year. That only means that we hope the vast majority of new features will be in place. Once we are feature complete, we start developing training material and promotional videos. This phase always dredges up bugs that need the be fixed and rough edges that need to be polished.
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@stevebaer
Is there a temporary solution for Rhino 7 on Apple silicone?
I think 2d drafting is the main issue.
I’m working with 2d drafting and having real trouble just panning the viewport around the drawings. It’s very very slow.
Rhino is really slowing down my work so I need a solution. Hope you can help here.
Thanks.
It strange.
I have a basic M1 Mac Mini and I find the performance quite decent. About the same as my workplace’s Xeon workstation…
the temp solution is to grab the v8 wip and use it on M1.
Yes. Testing it out but some bugs.
Current version seems more stable.
@stevebaer @wim
Current bug I’m getting with metal is working from within a detail viewport in layouts offsets the mouse cursor so it’s unpredictable what the curser will select.
I’m using RH7 on a MacMini M1. My project is pretty large. Usually I’m in a Ghosted view. At present I’m not so much disappointed by RH7 performances in the way I cannot stand them. Pretty good with them.
Obviously if RH8 was here, stable and usable, we all would be very pleased, indeed.
But have to say that at present RH8 is at a such developing stage that I would not recommend to use because in a continuous way.
Hi Morten -
Do you work with a single monitor or do you have multiple displays?
-wim
@wim @stevebaer
OpenGL seems to be much faster in the latest WIP release.
However I noticed that if you have Print Display set to ON in the layouts this slows down there modelspace significantly.
Just my laptop.