Rhino for Mac Hardware (system requirements)

We haven’t heard anything from Chaos Group about a Mac Vray.
I would not count on that.

hi John, yes not counting on that, would just use Keyshot, I have contacted Chaos Group and browsed their forums, I kind of got the impression Chaos and McNeel are not even communicating at the moment, my main question was would the above system be a good set up ?

The hardware will work fine for Mac Rhino, but with Mac Rhino’s limitations, will Mac Rhino work for you?

interesting, you’re telling me Rhino for Mac has big limitations against its Windows based partner ?

https://wiki.mcneel.com/rhino/mac/rhino5wincommandsnotinrhino5mac

there’s probably about 5 or 6 commands on that list I’d wish for right now, but I still manage efficiently and have done for years using Rhino in OSX , just needed feedback on hardware if the company wish to pursue having iMacs in there office

There you go.
Those are the kinds of things no one can decide but you.

i am just wondering about nvidia geforce or not, having a radeon in there. is that now a limitation? i thought to have read that the geforce is supposed to be substituted better due to its open gl compatibility. and since some changes are heading towards us for the next major mac release it would help in making decisions to know that more precise. also the upcoming imac pro will have some new radeon and it seems that mac generally has abandoned nvidia for the time being. maybe @stevebaer knows something?

Currently, the Radeons work better for Mac Rhino and the nVidia cards work better in Windows. The Radeons should be good in Windows V6 but are Not good for V5 in Windows.

and why is that?

Display drivers.

can you elaborate that a little closer?

Not much.
Apple writes their own OpenGL drivers and currently they are doing a good job on the AMD cards they use. They haven’t had nVidia cards in their systems for a while and it seems they don’t test the drivers against the old cards very well.

On the Windows side, there are two main graphics systems; DirectX and OpenGL. DirectX is for gaming and is the much larger market. AMD Radeons (in Windows) are intended for DirectX applications and since 2013, that division at AMD has not supported OpenGL. Their FirePro line of adapters are for OpenGL. They are very fast but their antialiasing isn’t very good.
nVidia’s DirectX card is the GeForce and Quadro for OpenGL. The performance on GeForce cards is throttled back for OpenGL but they still work quite well and a far less expensive than the Quadros.

Rhino is OpenGL based. Rhino V6 has a new graphics subsystem and will support higher OpenGL specifications and performance than V5 does.

I really doubt that helps any but that’s the short story.

mac grew up with open gl, nvidia specifically filled in this gap, for as long as i can think. now you tell me that all this has changed? seems pretty twisted but interesting to know.

but is there anything mcneel does towards addressing those cards also equivalently or is this all depending on the drivers only? i have seen that my NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT 512 MB is kind of still good in the run but the antialiasing got throttled quite some time ago. now i have only 2x which i barely use because it decreases the performance.

In Windows, we worth with the driver specifications and report problems to the card makers. Sometimes that helps, sometimes not.

The Apple side is entirely different. Allwe have is an OpenGL specification to write against.
Internal Apple development is Monks hidden in a Tower.
The OS is supposed to handle it all.
Nothing we can do.

Hi - I am currently using a late 2014 MacMini, 2,8 Ghz i5, 16 GB RAM, and Intel Iris 1536 MB Graphics card.

I have used V5.5Mac fine, and testing the new V6 WIP/Beta

The machine is totally choking , when I use Raytraced preview, and rendering is nearly impossible. Preview of Materials is a joke, and I do not see my self upgrading from V5.

I took a look at the newest and fastest MacMini on the market, and the Graphic Card
( Intel UHD Graphics 630 ) is, as usual with Mac, non-upgradeable, integrated in the CPU, allocating processing power from the System RAM.

But it can only allocate max 1.5 GB , and I have seen in another thread that I would need 8 GB VRAM

Do you have some sort of list of supported Mac models, and GPU and RAM configurations on said models, that would be powerfull enough for the V6 renderer?

I have a slight suspicion it can only be done with the new, seriously expensive iMacs, iMac Pro, and MacBook pro etc. but that is just… wow… update for Rhino, new Mac … setting me back what ? 7.000 $ ??

Thanks :slight_smile:

The Mac mini isn’t going to work well for the Cycles based Raytraced display in V6. If just doesn’t have the OpenGL resources and VRAM needed. The bigger AMDs do pretty well for V6.

Sorry

Oh, a double post.

See my response here, too:

sorry about that - but the two of you combined gives a pretty clear picture :slight_smile:
@John_Brock shoots the MacMini duck right down, which is kinda satisfying to know it is just not going to work, and thus saving the anguish of trying to make it, but as you inspire some hope… :slight_smile: and perhaps inviting to pandemic frustrations. In reality, its all about advanced knowledge in Rendering technology, and I have no clue to start with. I think this is the essence of what I am experiencing, when going from V5 to V6. I hope McNeal will make good documentation and give curating advice on system requirements for V6 for Mac - it seems like V6 is a big step up from v5, but also equally requires way more expensive Mac´s. (which is no fault of McNeel, but due to a greedy Apple)
I guess Im not the only one finding that my current machine is way too slow all of a sudden.

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I personally can’t say much about that - I’m more of a Windows/Linux guy on regular computers, mostly self-built :slight_smile:

I do hope you can find a way forward to work with!