Mac OSx Client Issues

Which of the two or three FPS measurements is it though?
The one at the top never goes above 4.5 for me, ever.
It cant be that can it?

This is likey a dual processor power PC G5 running at at least a gigahertz (or higher), with likely a gig of ram.
This is better than 90 percent of the machines you could ever have.

So no comparison at all to most of us.

I wrote this notecard a while ago on how to maximize Second Life on a Mac. If you've got an older machine, or around 64MB of video RAM, this may be very helpful! I've updated it for the current version.

Second Life and the Mac
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(scroll down to the Troubleshooting section for diagnosing and fixing problems)

First off, forget Ctrl-Clicking in Second Life! Cmd-Click (Apple-Click) is how it's done here, and note that the Mac Option key is equal to a PC Alt key. If you have a two button mouse you'll find SL a lot easier!

To find a Mac user group, click the Find button then the Groups tab. Type in Mac and hit Search. You can join the group from that window. Other Mac users will be happy to help you out

Based on experience, it seems the lowest Mac configuration that is acceptable for Second Life is a Powerbook G4/iBook G4 1GHZ with 768MB RAM and a 64MB Video card. If you have a G5 with 128 MB of video RAM, some of these modifications may not be necessary. My advice is to start here, and turn things up as long as you don't crash. Under this configuration and similar configurations the following settings are advisable in Preferences:

Graphics Tab > Performance Options: uncheck all settings except Shiny Objects.

Graphics Tab > Avatar Rendering: Select Normal.

Graphics Tab > Terrain Detail: this is variable, but the Some setting is acceptable.

Graphics Tab > Gamma: Don't worry about this, your Mac controls it. Only useful for full-screen mode, which is inadvisable on a Mac.

Graphics Tab > Display Resolution: Check Run in a window. Don't worry about the settings after that.

Adv. Graphics Tab > Performance Options: Check AGP if it's not grayed. If it's not able to be checked your Mac's video card does not support AGP, which greatly accelerates video. Obviously you want this checked!

Adv. Graphics Tab > Texture Cache Size: This depends on how much total RAM you have. If you have 768MB or more you should use the Large option. Keep in mind that running other applications at the same time as Second Life can reduce the amount of available RAM.

Adv. Graphics Tab > Video Card Memory: Max this out! It only goes up to the total amount of VRAM you have.

Adv. Graphics Tab > Object Detail: Move the slider to the middle.

Adv. Graphics Tab > Tree Detail: Move the slider to the middle.

Adv. Graphics Tab > Avatar Detail: Max it out if you can, but anything at the middle or above is good.

Adv. Graphics Tab > Avatar Vertex Program: This option can cause some problems on some Macs. If you check it and see weirdness (defined as your avatar staying gray, turning bright white or otherwise improperly rendering) for more than a minute, turn off this setting.

Adv. Graphics Tab > Show Avatar in Mouselook: Not necessary, it just shows your avatar's hands etc. when in Mouselook mode.

Adv. Graphics Tab > Draw Distance: In general, 64 meters is good for busy locations. If you want to take a picture of a beautiful scene you can up it much higher. For low traffic areas, 96 is good.

Adv. Graphics Tab > Fog Distance: This feature fades out things that are on the threshold of your draw distance. 1.5 to 2.5 is good for this option. if you have your draw distance down at 64 meters set the fog to 1.3.

Adv. Graphics Tab > Drop Draw Distance if FPS: In the event that your FPS (frames per second, or how fast SL can draw the screen) drops below this number, your draw distance will drop dramatically. Setting this to 0 disables the feature, 3-5 is a good option.

Adv. Graphics Tab > Bumpiness Draw Distance: With enabling Shiny Objects comes Bump Mapping, or making objects and/or avatars appear to have raised and recessed areas. Setting this to 5 - 10 is good.

Adv. Graphics Tab > Max Particle Count: Depending on you Mac you can increase or decrease this. 2048 is a good option.

Adv. Graphics Tab > Outfit Composite Limit: This has to do with how many recent outfits your video card "remembers". If you change your avatar as often as you change your socks, 1 or 2 is fine. If you tend to change avatars mid-sentence, 4 or 5 is a good option.

Troubleshooting
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Second Life stores it's cache files in the following location:
~/Library/Application Support/SecondLife (where ~ is your home folder)

Delete the whole cache folder every month or so to keep Second Life happy, or If you run into slow startups (SL hand icon bounces for a long time before displaying the SL window), strange texture issues and other things.

It is recommended not to run in full screen mode. It works for some but most find it to be more prone to crash.

AGP mode is recommended for all out-of-the-box Mac OS X-ready systems. Avatar Vertex Program should not be used on Macs with ATI video cards (all Powerbooks except the 17", all "iMac" G4 and G5 systems).

Run as few applications as possible while running Second Life, unless you have 1GB or more of RAM.

The Command/Cmd/Apple key is used to modify the mouse instead of the Control/Ctrl key in SL. This simulates the right-click on a PC mouse. You'll notice this will bring up the rotation rings. You can ignore them if you are clicking, they will not get in the way as of version 1.4.

Thanks a lot for your tips, Brent Actually, I'm on a PowerBook G4 15" @ 1.67 MHz with 768 MB of RAM, and my settings I have are 95% exactly like you suggested, after many tips, hints and trial-and-error. I'll be trying the remaining 5% today (probably after condemning my Mac to a "Tiger upgrade", lol) to see the difference!

I get ~5 fps at the Welcome Area or at The Shelter with less than 15 avs. On the rest of the world, it depends a lot on the sim I am. A "class 2" sim (yay for getting rid of the old "class 1" ones!) with 300-400 active scripts and ~300 Sim fps, with no other avatars, will get me 8-10 fps - a bit less up to the mystical "15 avatar limit", where things start to go seriously downhill. A "class 3" sim, with about the same characteristics, will be much better (at least 50% over that, and handling more than 15 avatars much better).

> 25 fps is something I only encounter on "class 3" sims with far less scripts (say, ~100). The Island Sandbox or the newer private islands are good testing areas where I can drool a bit with those settings. On those, even with 30 avatars, I manage 8-9 fps.

< 3 fps, well, that's what happens on popular clubs with > 25 avatars and 90% of them with 250-primmed hair There is no way I can get better performance there, even shutting everything down to the minimum settings, or even using the Debug menu to disable basically everything in the viewport (ie. you can get perhaps a 10-20% "performance boost" when doing that - and sincerely, there is no much difference between 3 fps and 3.5 fps )

Performance is acceptable compared to PCs. My roomie runs on a PC on the same cable connection. She has a similar graphics card, also 768 MB of RAM, and a Pentium @ 1 GHz, and she uses almost the same settings as I do. She gets about 20-50% less performance than my PowerBook, which is reasonable for her older machine.

Her boss is always proud to demonstrate a highly fine-tuned "handmade" PC which rarely drops below 50-60 fps. While I usually drool when I see that, his trick is simple - he has almost all settings on "minimum" (except for terrain) and the extra options like local lighting and shiny objects turned off. It's *amazing* to be in the WA with 50 fps and 60-80 avatars surrounding the fountain, I tell you

However, once I replicated my configuration on his PC, the fps suddenly dropped to 3 (!!!) fps, then crawled after a few seconds up to 6-7, and, after reloading all textures (a few minutes), was able to "sustain" 9-10 fps and sometimes 14-15 fps on low-lag sims. He was shocked! There went his top-of-the-line machine, crawling along SL like an old lady with a hurting back...

Lesson to be learned - tweaking with the performance settings is mandatory for having a good SL experience. What seems to be interesting is that the Mac is not so "settable". If you have the patience, go to a sim as a reference, and go from the lowest possible settings to the highest possible (well, do not increase drawing distance beyond a reasonable limit - yes, you can set it to 512 m or so, viewing across 2 sims, but there is no way your Mac will handle it, except for doing static pictures). What I see is mostly a 100%-150% difference. If your reference is 8 fps, the "lowest" settings will give you perhaps 10-12 fps, and the "highest" settings will drop you to 3-4.

On a PC, the dynamic range seems to be much higher. If you have a "reference" of 20-25 fps, and turn all settings down, it will go up into the 50-60 with ease. If you increase everything, you'll drop to the same 3-5 fps, also with the same ease. So you can fine-tune a PC better (older PCs will have the same "dynamic range" as a Mac...). At least that's what happens in my experience. I think that the reason for this behaviour is linked to the fact that so much work is done in software and not in the GPU.

As to stability issues, well, I have no doubt that everybody's mileage will vary. My roomie's PC is an uncommonly well-mantained Windows machine: no fancy in-memory-anti-virus, the plague of Windows - she relies upon traditional anti-virus instead; Mozilla instead of IE (and limited use of Outlook [not Express!] or MSN); almost no resident in-tray programs running beside the bare-bone essentials; no usage of any sort of p2p software; MS firewall is up (no third-party firewalls!); regular usage of the many maintenance tools - well, you get the idea. If you treat your machine well, Windows will be good to you She manages to work with Windows without crashing a lot. SL crashes on her, on average, once per day, which is reasonable for a PC.

Compared to that - and I'm usually logged in for the same amount of time, using the same connection, and the "slight handicap" of the wireless connection with only a 2/3 signal strength - I never crash SL on the more stable releases. My average of SL crashing (with 5 hours daily usage of SL) is perhaps less than once per month. That's about the same level of "stability" I have from things like Microsoft Word, Safari or Adium. Since this is the only Mac I have access to, I cannot say if my machine is unusually stable for some reason, or if it's just a question of getting your settings "right". Despite everything said in the forums or in-world, SL is much more stable right now than one year ago - where it wasn't unusual to crash, say, once every other hour, on average, and most of those crashes needed a "Force Quit" or even a full reboot. All these issues have completely disappeared from SL - I think the last time I rebooted my Mac due to SL was in January or so.

I'm very interested in watching the stability of SL under Linux - where you cannot put the blame on Microsoft bugs as an excuse for lower OS stability I think this will be a much fairer way to judge performance and stability only based on the hardware. I'll be eagerly waiting for that, although I probably will see the forums turning into a fighting arena around which will be the best Linux distribution to run SL

This latest release of SL seems to be very stable. I can't remember the last time it crashed on me. Sometimes I will have to relog for various reasons, but at least that's done by choice.

Oh, and that graphics card I was interested in above? Boughtinated! Not a massive performance increase, but I think it buys me 5-10 additional fps. I run at top settings unless I am really having problems, and average 20 fps, usually in sandboxes.

Put simply, the mac client's performance is atrocious.

I have a G4 1.5Ghz Powerbook. I also have a work laptop that is virtually identical to the Powerbook in all relevant specs (video, RAM, etc.) other than it has a 3Ghz Pentium-M. I _easily_ get 20-30 fps on the Windows client in areas that the mac gets 4-5 fps with the same graphics settings on each platform.

There is _no way_ that a 3Ghz Pentium-M is that much faster than a 1.5Ghz G4.

If I crank everything down as far as it will go on the Mac client, it's just barely usable. I probably have higher standards than a typical SL user, since I am trying to build things. Using the build tools at 2-3 fps is just an excercise in frustration.

Much work needs to be done to the mac client. I realize that there is a much smaller mac user base and therefore fewer resources will be put into it, but I'd almost prefer no mac client over a crappy one that just frustrates the users.

Agreed!!!

I have given up with LL, have communicated with them numerous times over the past year + - especially in the days when the Mac Client was in bets - which IMO, is where we are still today...They know of the problems, but have been unable to maximize the Mac Client.


Maybe it's time to organize ourselves and try some different avenues?

Wondering....


_/_/

I have been an avid Mac user/evangelist/developer for many years now. I have an Aluminum PowerBook 1.5 GHz, 128MB VRAM, and I have totaly given up on the Mac client for SL. WAY too frustrating. I now use a ShuttlePC (http://www.shuttle.com) and a DELL Inspiron XPS Gen2 laptop (http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/inspn_xps2?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs) for SL. The performance difference is night and day. I'm told that the Mac cllient code isn't optimized as well as the Windows version. Duh. I agree with Ledge Korvin: "I'd almost prefer no mac client over a crappy one that just frustrates the users."

I'm a Mac developer since 1985. I run SL on my Macs and it seems usable, but I'm sort of glad to see people saying the PC runs it much better - it means there may be big improvements in Mac performance someday. But the thing DOES work, and I'm glad. Even my 12" PowerBook at only 867MHz 640MB can run it in a pinch, with everything turned off. I do understand the complaints though. Once you've seen software like this run smoothly at high frame rates, it's mighty difficult to accept so much less.

Mac OSX uses the graphics chip heavily to do its eye candy, things like Dock magnification for example. And, it also uses Open GL fro its drawing. This is good since it means these things are paid great attention to by Mac OS developers, but it is bad because processes running on the Mac alongside SL tend to take up these resources which SL needs.

My suggestion, contrary to the earlier advice, is to use full screen. This keeps other graphics contexts like the dock, menu bar, and Finder and other windows offscreen, maximizing SL access to the resources. You can also control the overall screen resolution for SL more easily. You can keep your screen at its usual resolution, and specify a different, perhaps a bit lower, resolution for the game and it all autoswitches nicely.

I have a dual CPU machine and it doesn't seem like SL takes advantage of that. Though it does run some multiple threads, I don't think I've ever seen SL use more than 100% CPU, the other CPU is barely doing anything. So I hope this is going to get a lot of attention in future versions of SL. It could very likely make ALL the difference, as the computer is usually CPU bound when running SL. Almost all Macs are dual processor, and future ones will likely go to Quad processor (two dual-processor CPU chips).

Finally, I've learned somehow that the current SL won't run on the upcoming Intel Macs under emulation, since they use AltiVec (of course.) I assume though, that a native Intel Mac version will appear by the time the machines do. If you need testers I can help.

I believe 3D graphics use mostly GPU, not CPU in Mac at least Panther or later. My G5 dual processors have been used around 50% each since I got GeForce6800 Ultra. I don't think this means a disadvantage of the dual CPU, but they just aren't used much.
And I've compared FPS with a windows user who has Pentium4 3.4GHz with GeForce6600. My rate was better than her. That's a useful information. Thank you.