08-22-2004 13:48
Hello,

First of all, I must thank Linden Labs for thinking about the small Macintosh community around here and for the excelelnt work in putting the Mac SL interface operational. Yes, it may have some quirks, but it works rather well, even for a Beta.

Actually, if it weren't for the announcement of the beta in Apple's site, I'd never known about Second Life at all!

Anyway, I just have one little quirk. I run a PowerPC G4 1.25 MHz with 768 MB RAM. I can turn ALL features on and get quite respectable performance - up to 15 fps on an "empty" sim which I was told is about the "theoretical maximum" I can get.

However, if I log in with Anisotropic filtering on, SL will ALWAYS crash. But I can turn it off, log in, and after loading a few textures or so (after, say, 30 seconds) I can go to Preferences and check the Anisotropic filtering again. It seems to be actually "doing" something - better shadowing and ambient lighting anyway - so I guess the option is really "on". And it works perfectly for hours and hours, until I log off and in again.

This is a tiny quirk and I can live with it, but probably I would like to have the feedback. Perhaps it's something very easy to fix! I have sent several dozens of crashreports of this, to give Linden Labs an idea on what's going on.

Unlike several users, I find that I can have both Photoshop, a web browser, and SL, all on at the same time, and performance in SL is not much worse than that, as well as as stable as if running "alone". Mac OS X 10.3.5's scheduler is doing quite a job here! Actually, I can get WORSE performance from my combined IM clone (AdiumX) than from SL itself... so great job people! Congratulations!
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