Trying to trial run Rhino 8 but program just crashes at open.
I’m wondering if this is graphics related (GTX 680 should support metal).
Or possibly due to the fact that I’m running Monterey 12.7 on this old machine by way of OCLP boot loader.
Anyone out there running Rhino 8 on an a MacPro 5,1?
Hi -
Yes, somehow running a version of macOS on Apple hardware that Apple says is not supported is not something that we can support either.
According to Apple, the newest compatible operating system for your machine is macOS 10.14 Mojave. You need at least macOS 12.4 Monterey for Rhino 8.
-wim
Makes sense. I suppose I’m long overdo for a hardware upgrade.
Thanks for the reply, Wim!
Anyone out there running Rhino 8 on an a MacPro 5,1?
I had been (the last release of Monterey) on a heavily modded 5,1 up until recently. I’d put in server pull 3.46 Hex Cores, 256GB ram, added a Radeon RX580, ditched SATA for a NVME boot volume in a 16x slot host adapter, swapped out the BlueTooth and Wifi modules for current gen stuff, added a USB3 card (as the existing ports past some version of OC only work for KB / Mouse and my 3DConnexion stopped working).
I didn’t do OCLP though, as while hyped to hell and back it just isn’t very solid (especially for things like Fusion / Rhino / etc).
I’d been using the generic vanilla open core with a manually built config using the stickied thread on MacRumors.
And that (at least for Rhino) was fine. Didn’t have any issues but then again wasn’t pushing the envelope trying to get Monterey to deal with Hack patched video cards etc. I just ran a Radeon RX580 Pulse Sapphire and it worked fine.
What finally pushed me over the edge were the bugs and issues cropping up in of all things, Outlook. MS insists on pushing patches to the O365 stuff and never thinks for a minute that their end arounds code wise will have any repercussions and one of those patches killed the ability to search emails because it never dawned on them that any other app might be using spotlight on the same files for the same thing. (I use objDev’s LaunchBar, and had been for a good decade).
In order to get past that issue I had to move past Monterey and there was no way due to the lack of AVX instructions on the video card it’d run reliably. OCLP claims they got it working (with a mess of caveats) but that’s only in the sense of “will it boot = working just fine”.
The second you started touching things that needed metal and the missing AVX instructions its hello crater city (AKA Fusion / Autocad / Rhino and from what I gathered on various forums AI, Final Cut, Davinci, and a mess of others), so I knew Monterey was the end of the line.
So due to lack of email search, I had to get a new machine for the first time since 2009.
Which Sucked. Hard.
I’d got used to cheap ram, cheap video cards, cheap procs and cheap pretty much everything. That final build on 2 of my 3 5,1’s ran a whopping total of maybe $500 for everything for both em.
The 4 Xeon Hex Core 3.46’s and the pair of RX580’s was the bulk of that. The ram was almost laughably trivial (512GB in 16GB sticks) for compared to what apple charges these days.
I was kinna hoping to last until the M4 versions of the studio shipped, as anything but a studio doesn’t even come close to my RAM requirements.
I was running 256GB on the 5,1’s and would still run out by the end of the day as at any given time I’ve got Rhino / Fusion / PrusaSlicer / Autocad / Parallels / Outlook / Excel and often Handbrake and a mess of other stuff open at once with a good 30-50 tabs in Safari (product spec lookups) and god knows how many PDF’s open.
On the 5,1’s the second I got to within 10-12GB of the 256GB in use, it’d slow to a crawl.
If I continued and it hit swap disc (even with a NVME SSD in a 16X slot adapter) the crawl turned into wait 30 seconds between keystrokes for them to show up,
So often I’d have to reboot a couple times day and reopen all that stuff just to get enough ram back to continue working.
As a project based engineer at any given moment I if I get a call from the field I may need to open an additional 4-8 hefty Rhino files, bunches more PDF’s and Excel docs to support a given job in process.
So as much as I hated being pushed to make the jump before those M4 Studios shipped I had to take the plunge and settled on the 24 Core / 60 Core GPU / 192GB studio.
It was stupid expensive, even with my ex military discount. However being as I haven’t had to buy a new machine since 2009… Ok. OpenCore and my maxed out 5,1’s had kinna spoiled me.
That being said… I don’ regret it.
I do like the massive cut to the wattage consumption as it makes my office a LOT cooler, it handles 3 4K displays way better than the Radeon RX580 did (and the cabling via USBC/Thunderbolt is loads cleaner), and it’s just a hell of a lot faster than the 5,1 was across the board.
Stuff that would take an eternity on the 5,1’s (like a merge all coplanar faces on an imported part that came outta auto cad or any non step “mesh” format) have gone from a “come back after dinner and hope maybe it’s completed” to “go read a couple emails and work on something else for a bit”. In short, ludicrously faster.
I had several Rhino projects that were in the 80-100GB range and while you could open em on the 5,1s and do work, you have to be clever turning lots of layers of etc just to keep it marginally fluid. Opened those same files on the Studio and was just stunned how responsive they were.
Likewise in Fusion stuff that would bring it to it’s knees (like a modeled Knurl) or a change to user property on a sketch 30-50 steps back in the timeline that would ripple through all the down stream stuff is a whole lot more livable.
So yeah, I feel yer pain. Hated the massive outpouring of cash, but loving the increased throughput and overall stability.
Thank you for such a thorough response!
You’ve saved me a lot of time that would have otherwise been spent trying to hobble my way through hardware upgrades and a million boot cycles - to probably just find myself in the same position next year if/when other softwares decide to drop Monterey support.
Decided to check out these new M4 chips by way of a Mac Mini. At 24gb I’m at half of what I had in RAM on the Mac Pro - but I think/hope I know enough to know that this is not going to be a bottleneck for my usage.
Cheers!