Will a multi core processor help me with Rhino?

Rhino is my primary software. I’m considering upgrading hardware to better support a different software that is calculation heavy, where multiple cores equate to less run time.

If performance in Rhino were improved then I’d likely go for an even better processor. Based on what I find in the forum I don’t think that will be the case, but it would be good to hear from someone with more experience on the subject.

Currently running Rhino 5. Likely will upgrade to Rhino 6 later this year. I design boats, and my models have gotten large as of late (>800 MB by project completion) to incorporate all of the small detailed models received by suppliers. I don’t do much rendering work. Save time is getting high with these models, and there’s quite a bit of latency when viewing the model as shaded or rendered… will the additional cores assist with this issue? Or is it primarily video card that will improve it?

Specifically I’m looking at the following hardware (processor and dual video cards). I’m all ears to hear anyone’s experience with this challenge.
Thanks
DR

• NVIDIA® Quadro® P2000 (5 GB GDDR5X, 4 DisplayPort, PCIe x 16) 2nd Graphics
• NVIDIA® Quadro® P2200 Graphics (FH, 5 GB GDDR5X, 4 DisplayPort, PCIe x16)
• Intel® Core™ i9-10940X Processor (3.3 GHz, up to 4.6 GHz w/Boost, 19.25MB Cache, 2933MHz, 14 core, 165W)

Moved to Hardware category.

You might consider sniffing around that category a bit.

Thanks John, will do

Very few Rhino tools use multiple cores, so tons of them doesn’t make much sense except for software rendering or some other task.

Your video card choice is strange, just get one high end card instead of 2 mediocre ones, Rhino can’t use both to speed up the viewports. Rhino doesn’t really need a Quadro.

Amd is trouncing Intel at all price points.

Jim, thanks for the input. I spent over an hour looking on the forum before posting, so I appreciate you addressing a topic that’s already been discussed.

Understood re tons of cores… I’ll choose that based on the other software alone. What was unclear was how much it would help with the visual stuff. Every detail goes to mill/CNC these days so I am zooming out to 50 feet, then back in to 0.1 inches, and back, all day long… the program can struggle with that when there is a ton of detail open, causing delay and breaking up work flow. But I’ll focus on video card to help there.

My choice for VC is strange bc I rely on guidance from the vendor to guide me… I do what I do well, but running my own gig, taking the time to understand the hardware completely is not often viable. Unfortunately I’m finding that the guidance I used to receive (and trust) is now sub-par (to put it nicely).

I’ve discussed your suggestion with colleagues and now looking in that direction… thanks again.

DR

Jim, just reread this… I want to clarify, when I spoke of sub-par guidance I was referring to the agents helping to sell me the equipment. And thus my post here to receive more informed guidance.
DR

@pascal how about posting Detailed minimum and recommend hardware specs for the various versions of Rhino?

It’s not a game, you can technically “run” it on almost anything–see: everyone using a laptop with cruddy Intel Integrated video–it depends very much on what you consider “minimum” and what you’re doing. We’re talking orders of magnitude differences in requirements.

Also don’t forget that if you work with very large and detailed models what becomes increasingly important is a) lots of high quality and fast RAM and b) fast storage for loading.

For a) I would say that 32GB is a good size, but if you are having a system put together than good and fast RAM should also be used. I don’t think that super expensive ECC Ram is necessary

For b) you just want to have a fast SSD and/or a fast file server connection

Other than that for the CPU you want to look at the single core performance. Most things you do in Rhino/Grasshopper will only use a single core. Less cores usually mean higher single core performance. Also you will see that there is not huge gains at the high end. That super duper i9 is not THAT much faster than a normal i7 or even the i5 in single-core for example.

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_benchmark-cinebench_r15_single_core-7

You can see that the single core performance varies by less than 10% across a whole lineup of the current generation, meaning the i5 has only about 10% less single-core performance than the i9, even though the later costs more than twice as much.

Save your money and invest it in other things that make life more bearable or save you some time elsewhere.

For example the craziest custom built machine is worthless if something goes wrong with it and its hard to fix/replace. Investing in those things will yield more gains than a marginal increase in performance. Things like having data on a file server, making sure you have a proper backup strategy, etc. If those things save you a day or 2 a year that is the same as having something calculate half a second faster but will give you gains elsewhere.

The 80/20 rule suggest that optimising the last 20% will take 80% of effort. Therefore I believe it makes more sense to get everything to 80%, rather than trying to get 1 thing to 100% but leaving others at less than 80.

I hope that makes sense :slight_smile:

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I built a new rig three years ago that was at least 3x more powerful than my old one. I barely noticed a difference with Rhino. With big 2D files it’s still faster to export into Illustrator to generate render hatches. Had I known that I would have waited and spent less. Kicking myself for not waiting on first gen Ryzen.

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Well the best hardware advice I ever got was “wait as long as you can, spend as much as you can, don’t look back.”

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Well I wouldn’t necessarily expect much better advice from us just because we use (and make!) Rhino, that doesn’t really mean much, just looking up gaming/“professional” benchmarks will work as well–and what they’ll tell you is the differences are small. But yeah that video card recommendation is the most bizarre thing I’ve ever heard.