Hello, I´m currently using Rhino 6 and 7 for mac ( Intel ) and they both work fine. I have to say that I use Rhino 6 more because it gives me a better screen capture in rendered mode. In 7 for exanple the ground plane doesn´t display so well. I´m now thinking about updating for a new Mac M1 and a bit concerned how Rhino will work with this. Will Rhino 7 run smoother on M1 than Intel? Many thanks
Hi Markus -
Not really. Rhino 7 requires good OpenGL support to display objects in the viewports. Machines running on Apple Silicon only have bare-bone support for OpenGL. Additionally, Rhino 7 uses Apple’s Rosetta Translation Environment to automatically translate Intel applications to run on Apple Silicon.
Rhino 8 will fully support Metal for its display, and is available as a Universal Binary to natively run on Apple Silicon.
-wim
I’ve used Rhino 5, 6, and 7 on an Intel Mac (Core i7 2.9Ghz) and currently I’m using Rhino 7 and 8 on an M1 Max and Ultra.
Generally, both M1 computers are way faster at anything than the old Intel Mac and silent. It’s like night and day, really, and the energy consumption is so ridiculously low that I already noticed a difference on my monthly energy bill.
I use Blender, Houdini, the Affinity programs, AutoCAD, ArchiCAD, Final Cut, etc. and all of these applications work great.
Rhino is still somewhat of a black sheep. Rhino 7 is not native and relies on legacy OpenGL, but for 2D drafting, N.u.r.b.s and SubB modelling, it still works quite good.
What isn’t great or rather pretty bad is rendering with Cycles. It works but it takes forever, as opposed to Metal Cycles in Blender which is super fast on the M1 chip. Also scenes with lots of meshes tend to be laggy.
Now, the McNeel folks like to loop people into their Rhino 8 WIP testing program by promising greener pastures for us Mac user (e.g. TestMetal) - after all the community can be milked for free - but it should be noted that raytraced rendering with Metal isn’t implement yet and the weekly updates often break stuff.
Hi Everyone,
Let my jump in the conversation 
Just change my laptop for a Mac M1 MAX 16" 2021 Version 12.6.6. - used to work with a MacBook Pro 16’’ 2019 - and suddenly all of my Rhino 7 files are slow down or do not work at all. Impossible to navigate smoothly in the 3D model from 300Mo to 2Go.
It seems I am not the only one with this problem - is there any update / solution ?
I was obviously hoping for the opposite …
Thank you
Marie
Rhino 8 will be the solution.
V7 was written and compiled for the Intel CPU and OpenGL graphics Macs.
To run Intel/OpenGL software on Silicon Macs, Apple provided a software translation layer called “Rosetta”. If is not fast and has problems. Apple seems uninterested in fixing it.
Your 2019 Intel Mac will run Rhino V7 better and always will.
Your Silicon Mac will run V8 much better as it will be a binary compatible, Silicon/Metal application and not require Rosetta.
Thank you John !
So let’s go for Rhino 8 BETA -
any idea when the last version will be available ?
Our best guess is later this year.
There is still a lot of work to do.
Since you own a V7 license, you can try the V8 Work-In-Progress:
1 Like