Wish: Make Rhino viewport use instancing

I remember a discussion a while ago on the Rhino viewport and instancing or the lack thereof.

We just came to realise this again with our .3dm files that we export from our own software with many block instances. It is always the same block instance, but instanced anywhere from a few thousand to over a million instances.

In our software this renders at a breezy >120fps with shadows, AO, etc.

But once you open the file in Rhino it just screeches to a halt. In Wireframe mode it simply refuses to render anything. Shaded mode works, but at like 0.3fps.

Shouldn’t block instances in Rhino actually use instancing in the viewport? I thought that would kind of be a no-brainer.

I know our use case is a bit special, but it will benefit the responsiveness even with far fewer instances, but if the instances are more elaborate (for our use its usually just simple boxes or very simple geometry).

Is there anything for Rhino 8 planned in this regard?

I can tell that it does, I recently (accidentally) did a 500-million-polygon rendering and certainly saw a difference in the viewport…to an extent! But it was a relatively small number of blocks.

You mean with Rhino 8? I will try it out.

I meant 7…I think?