Rhino very slow on M1 Mac

Hey, I bought the M1 MacBook Pro with 16gb of ram thinking it would be powerful enough for rhino as there is some people doing heavy video editing with it. Unfortunately when opening big files rhino becomes unusably slow, and sometimes even crash. It happens when there is 3D most of the time.
Is there an M1 version coming in the next months? I tried downloading rhino 8 but I can’t make it work as I’ve got a student licence. I’m concerned that I won’t be able to work with rhino when I go back to classes in a few weeks…

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Hi -

I can’t find any crash reports connected to your Rhino Account. Are you sending in crash reports?
Can you upload a file that is slow on your system to Rhino - Upload to Support - please add the link to this thread in the “Comments” field.
Also, please run the Rhino SystemInfo command and copy-paste the result here.

There isn’t going to be a special M1 version of Rhino any time soon.

An educational license will let you run the Rhino 8 WIP - an evaluation version will not.
-wim

Thanks for your answers, I will try sending crash reports in the next few days. Gonna try again with Rhino 8 too.

Hi, got the same problem, Rhino7 is running very slow on Mac (24inch) M1 and sometimes even crash.
Hope you"ll fix it soon.

Hi Herman -

We can only do that if we can reproduce what is happening. Are you experiencing this with a specific model? Are you sending in crash reports? We’ll need as much details as possible…
-wim

I have the same problem. When opening larger files, rhino crashes every time … I am using a MacBook Pro with 16 GB of RAM and a full M1Pro CPU. I checked the usage of the RAM and CPU during the crash, but that doesn’t seem to be the problem … I work with Rhino at the university and I am not able to work with it right now … when will Rhino be optimized for arm??? please for quick help!

This post is pinned:

Could you share a file that is constantly crashing Rhino with us so we can try and repeat it here?

Since it is probably a very large file, you could send it using our file transfer service at
https://www.rhino3d.com/upload

Please include this URL in the comments:

Thanks

I want to contribute too and therefore I’ll upload my file as well.
Experiencing slow performances in 3d view both in panning and orbiting. Tried with V7 and V8wip.
Another very annoying issue is that the autosave is too much invasive: every few commands or view changes I notice MacOS beachball while Rhino wait the file saving ends.
File (220 MB) was originally developed on RH6 on iMac (mid 2010) on MacOS High Sierra

I’d like to provide some feedback about some new discover:
my file has 10 snapshots (it’s an architectural project with 3 horizontal plan sections, 2 vertical sections and global views) that help me in handling what I need to view (layers, views…).

I’ve tried deleting 4 snapshots and filesize decreased to 159MB. What I noticed accordingly is that autosave time became less impacting. So I’m at present pointing my finger to SNAPSHOTS for repetitive beachball on MacOS. (tests done on iMac (mid 2010).

Hello,
I have a problem that my new MacBook Pro, M1pro, 32GB. Started to work very, very slowly when opening a more complicated file in my Rhino7 (file has 133MB). Strange thing is that I opened the same file a week ago and it was working fine. When I open the same file on my old MacBook pro 2013, it works way better. Please let me know if you have any idea what could be wrong. This drives me crazy.

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Hi -
Would it be possible to share that file? If you’d rather not post it here, you could upload it to Rhino - Upload to Support. Make sure to copy the URL to this thread in the comments field if you chose to use that web page.
-wim

Hi,
I uploaded the file (train2) via link you sent me but I did not see any option to copy the URL…so I am sending the file via wetransfer here:

Download link

@venamly you don’t have to share it via wetransfer. Tech support gets automatically notified when a file is uploaded using the uploader utility. The request was to copy the link to this very discussion to the comment field of upload form so that tech support knows why the file was uploaded.

ok, I will upload the file again… I checked with my friend who has the macbook with M1 and it works as well super slow when working opening my file. Is it possible that the Rosetta Rhino translation is so bad and slow? If so I just bought useless expensive computer…

Hi there I am experiencing the same problem. I am working on a M1 16"21 64 GB macOS Monterey and rhino runs slower than on my Mac Book Pro from 2014. Is there anything planned to improve this performance issue?

Same issue here, M1 64GB so slow…much slower than my 2015 Macbook pro with the same projects. I’m working with files around 400MB to 700MB and it’s impossible to operate them. This is so painful…

@venamly, @benjamin_beck, @Giulio1

did you try Rhino 8 WIP and run the command TestMetal?
I don’t own an M1 Mac, but did a very quick tests with a friends M1. Turning on TestMetal in shaded display mode, resulted in a near 10x increase of the frame-rate.

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@rudolf.neumerkel thanks a lot!! indeed this works way better but feels still pretty weak regarding the performance the M1 should bring…

The Metal backend is still work in progress.