Mac G5 Users: Does Second Life run at all for you?

Last night I had to talk my business partner out of leaving Second Life, because the new official client crashes so often on her G5 Power Mac that she can barely stay on for a few minutes at a time. She's also reporting that she gets about 5-10 fewer frames-per-second now, even when she sets her graphics to the Low option. She has already sold all her mainland holdings, but said she'd stay in SL for me- and I promised to help find her a solution.

She's tried clearing cache and re-installing the viewer, but these things have made no impact. I've asked her to file a support ticket, but in the mean time I'd like to know if anyone out there has seen similar symptoms on G5 Power Macs, and would like to know what (if anything) you did to fix it?

Without more detail it's a bit difficult, there are several distinct models of Powermac G5 towers. I have a dual 2.5ghz model and it runs OK w/ the new viewer (/me looks around for some wood to knock).

Is it a dual proc? What Graphics card? OS version? Amount of RAM?

Stuffing it up w/ RAM is a pretty good idea (anything less than 2 GB w/ SL is probably too light on RAM)

The latest client tried to force me into "Lowest" settings w/ my stock 128mb ATI 9600. Unfortunately AGP cards are pretty light on the ground that are much better (and work in a mac). I know the days of SL being decent on these older machines is getting limited, I've been tempted to look around for a better graphics card.

I'd make sure the OS is as up to date as it can get, since on macs the OpenGL and driver updates are done by Apple as part of that process.

All that said I did a 3 hour show on friday and another 1 hour show on sunday using the new client, and was running SL, NiceCast and Garage Band (and probably a few other things like Safari) all at once, This client hasn't been especially crashy for me, though there were some really nasty network connectivity problems over the weekend, I avoided most of that time period, simply by being too busy IRL to log on anyway.

I have asked her to provide specs. I do know that she has been using Nicholaz okay, but I just learned today that he's no longer going to be making new releases.

It seems she posted her own thread on this, but here are the specs she quoted to me:

Here's her thread:

OK, sounds like her specs are real close to mine, except the 10.4.11 vs 10.5.2 and I still use the stock ATI 9600 card.

Hmm. SL works "OK" for me, but it's never been great w/ this card. One common trick is to throttle the VRAM setting down (under the "Hardware" button). It lies to SL that its a smaller amount, so SL doesn't try and hog all the texture memory.

I think she just learned that trick today, and it did indeed cut down on her crashes. She still locks up if she tries to resize her window though, and I've heard this is a common problem.