I’m 30 days into the trial version 7 and have had lots of minor problems with it and it has crashed many times. I have a stable version of Rhino5 and have been slowly learning it for many years on a Sony I5 laptop with 6 GB ram. this has worked very reliably but ever since downloading version 7 there has been constant problems. The first was a very slow to respond display, especially in shaded mode, oddly it was quicker with rendered mode. This got much worse as the complexity of the model increased. Yesterday it crashed 3 times and is barely usable at the moment. The model I’m working on is around 1.2 GB and it only seems to function when I isolate a small section.
I have just recieved a refurbished Dell base unit with an I5 processor and 16 gb ram and was wondering if it is possible to switch the trial version to this computer?
It should be. How to do it depends on where you installed the evaluation license key.
If you created a Rhino account and put the evaluation license in there, good news - you don’t actually have to do anything except make sure Rhino is closed on the old machine. Then install Rhino on the new machine and during the install, tell it to use the license in your account. Done.
If the evaluation license key was installed locally on the old machine, go to Options>License and hit the “Change license” button, then choose “Remove license”. Make sure the machine is connected to the internet at the time, so that it sends a signal back to the license server that the license has been removed.
Then install Rhino on the new machine and add the license back in there. You will need to re-validate the license with the same e-mail address you used on the first machine.
If something goes wrong in the process, then it’s best to contact sales@mcneel.com directly for help in resolving the problem.
As far as crashing goes, often it’s due to video card/driver issues. So make sure you update the video drivers on the new machine to the latest available. You didn’t specify which card it has, I hope it’s adequate - you should have a minimum of 4Gb VRAM for running a single screen. 16Gb RAM is really minimum especially if you are working on very large files as you indicate. Keep an eye on Rhino’s memory usage in Task manager to see if you are running out.
Thanks for the quick reply.
I keep task manager on all the time and see it stuggling to keep up with version 7.
I have an account but not sure if there is the evaluation licence is in there.
I’m going to try to install version 5 and take it from there.
Can you recommend a buget video card that would be suitable?
You may want to try some of the following custom viewport modes to check if they will perform better than Rhino’s own default Shaded viewport mode. I recommend you to first try the Bobi 1.ini mode, because on my PC it’s considerably faster than Shaded mode. Bobi 2.ini is nearly identical, except that it has a white background and hidden surface isocurves.
Thanks Bobi, I’ll give them a try.
That last image in the thread you linked to is stunning.
In what way “struggling”? Maxing out the RAM? GPU at max 100%?
Well, just log in to your account and see…
Also if you go to Options>Licenses in Rhino it will tell you if you are using the license in your account.
(yours will say “Evaluation”, not “Not for Resale Lab”)
If it doesn’t say Rhino Accounts, then you probably installed the license locally.
Yes, the ram is maxed out. When the model went over 1.3 gb it just could’nt cope anymore and crashed out.
I have ordered a graphics card and ssd drive. Hopfully this will speed things up.
Yesterday I stated a new project, Sunday spaceships. Straight away it felt fine, little lag and no crashes.
This was done in a day and is only 27mb.
This has taken me weeks and is 1.3gb!
Have you tried the ! _ClearAnalysisMeshes command to reduce the RAM usage and file size yet?
Hi Bobi, yes, it helps. Only 30 mb but it all adds up.
I went through the file and ditched everything I didn’t need and managed to get it
under 1gb. It’s just about usable.
The easiest way to keep the file size small is to use surfaces with minimum amount of control points. Usually “Network surface”, “Offset surface”, “Shell”, “Flow along surface” and a few more tools will produce overly-dense surfaces that may cause huge file size.
OffsetSrf uses the number of control points it needs to produce an offset within the specified tolerance - unless the “Loose” option is selected. The Loose option retains the original point structure but the offset may be less accurate. Shell uses the number of control points it needs to produce an offset within the absolute tolerance and does not have a Loose option. Similarly other commands result in increased numbers of control points to maintain accuracy. Many commands have options which allow trading off accuracy for reducing number of control points.
Another cause of surfaces with a large number of control points is the input: curves with an excess number of control points or an excessive number of input curves.
That’s the reason why in most cases I prefer to use either loose offset or create a copy of the original surface and use “MoveUVN” in the N direction to offset its control points. Quite often the latter approach results in a much more consistent offset surface than Rhino’s own loose offset. You can clearly see the difference at the 13:53 minute and then 14:43 minute of the following video:
Ok, so I have the new computer up and running with the trial version 7. I’ve installed a Radeon RX6400 graphics card with 4gb of vram but still it’s very slow to do anything. Change view, wait 10 seconds, try to move a part of a model and wait another 10 seconds etc. Every action seems to kick off a “not responding” message in task manager, yet there is only <30% processor usage.
Then there is trying to render a file, almost every time something fails. Either there are odd artefacts or weird shadows. I was also getting full crashes while trying to load big environments (80mb instead of <10mb).
Then sub-d failed to switch to box mode. I even re-installed everything and guess what sub-d still the same. Every thing looks fine but nothing happens when I switch to box.
Compairing render times between systems with the same small file, it took 47 seconds on my old laptop and 2.59 seconds (plus almost double that before it started rendering!). In reality it was over 5 mins.
So I start trawling through Rhino options looking for the problem, first thing I notice is there are different option for each system (windows 8.1 vs windows 10). Under appearance setting there is no option for antialiasing in windows 10, but there is in 8.1. Also, under video hardware it’s listed as Microsoft open gl with 64mb total video memory, where as back on the old laptop it’s AMD radeon 7500m and 1gb of video memory. If I look in the task manager under performance I can see the GPU radeon there but the only time I have seen any activity was when I enabled AMD noise filtering in the renderer, and even then it was just 1%. It’s on the lastest drivers and is there in the device manager above microsoft. The only setting I can find is graphics setting and in there is Rhino7 set to high performance, no other options.
Really I’m struggling to get anywhere with this. Everything is much slower and looks grainy, jagged lines etc. Where as back on the old lap top it looks smooth and moves 5-10 times faster (but crashes out all the time with big files).
I think I have a hardware and software issues. Any help would be appreciated.
Hi @Sean_Kelly
First thing to do is start Rhino and run the SystemInfo command in Rhino. Copy the resulting text and post it here in its entirety. That will hopefully give someone an idea of what’s going on/wrong 
HTH, Jakob
Hi Jakob,
thanks for the quick reply. It looks like a school boy error. The HDMI cable was plugged into the wrong socket. I initially tried the Radeon one but it was a blank screen. I have just re-plugged and waited a few mins and eventually the screen came to life.
The good news is all seems to be working in one hit, movements are much quicker, no rendering artifacts, sub-d switching to box etc all good!
system info Rhino7 v1.txt (2.9 KB)
After re-plugging.
system info Rhino7 v2.txt (2.3 KB)
Thanks for the help, my stress levels are much lower. 