SL on Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard)?

Hi all just got Leopard this afternoon, installed (about an hour) and ran SL Nicholaz viewer, which I have been using (in 10.4.10) as it seems more stable and gives a couple more FPS (I play ice hockey in SL). So far its all good, about the same as 10.4 or maybe a tad faster.

I will have to check out that viewer!

If you don't mind me asking what are your system specs.

Macbook Pro, 10.5, 2gb RAM, 2ghz Core Duo, Radeon x1600

Did any of you who are running Leopard download and re-install SL AFTER installing Leopard?

Since I use my Intel Mac Mini *mostly* for SL, I'm checking Leopard performance before installing it (delivered today, as promised). Because there are so few of you with Leopard up and running, and I can't tell whether you're running it on Intel Macs, or what your SL performance was with OS X 4 for comparison purposes, I'm going to wait for more info from this group.

FYI, I have had excellent performance (well, as excellent as LL can produce - HA!) from SL with OS X 4.10. I'm willing to postpone the joy of Leopard until I have a reasonable expectation of similar performance, whether it takes a new SL release or a fix from Apple.

Yes, Intel verssus PowerPC would be interesting. I have a MacBook Pro and I think Leopard should improve things. Right?

I'm running on Intel iMAC, and I did a complete install of leopard and a fresh installation of second life, still having the same problems :/

How completely embarrassing for Linden Labs. One would think that they
have been compiling against the 10.5 developer seeds for the last 6
months.

It makes one wonder what sort of technical leadership there is at LL.
Look at the employment page, with the emphasis on "cool". Look
at the Tao page, with emphasis on picking your own projects.
... and then look at the results...

Linden Labs needs world class leaders and communicators. Someone
should have *dictating* this as a project to nail down. The groovy
"pick what you want to work on" approach is not working very well.

It's also funny how all the windows users are still not able to use Second Life smoothly on windows vista either, I mean vista been out for how long now, and it's still not supported all the way with SL.

I just installed Leopard on my MBP with 8600 graphics. It seems a little faster, but no difference on the memory leak problem, still have to change screen resolutions every few minutes to reclaim memory. Also the Wiki workaround does still work.

Just downloaded the latest viewer 1.18.4 (1) , TOO early to tell for sure but seem to work better, less memory leakage.

The release candidate runs quiet stable still slow but much better compared to the official release.

official release running just fine on my Rev1 Macbook Pro (ATI X1600) with Leopard

Looks like we are all having a bit of problems , yeah that memory leak is bad

so far I have run Nicholaz, Onrez and SL official viewe with Mac OS 10.5 on Macbook Pro, 2 gig Ram, 2ghz core duo, Radeon x1600. NO problems! Please, let us know if you do have a problem, and maybe it can be figured out. So far, it looks like easy peasy upgrade!

Still having problems, do you have any suggestions of anything I can try, I just got done installing and playing world of warcraft and it runs so smooth and nice, But still second life I run it and its choppy, I have even tried decreasing my graphic card settings for SL. Still no luck!

Running SL on Leopard as well, and I can confirm it has some serious slowdowns when switching from SL to other applications, for 3-4 seconds at a time, during which the mouse goes all crazy, super sensitive and choppy in movement, hard to explain but heh
But I am not really concerned so far, I guess it still needs to be optimized for 10.5...

In one room, depending upon where I was, I went from frame rates of 2-3 FPS in a good part of it, all the way up to an amazing 45+ FPS, much closer to the walls. This is 10.5 on a MacBook Pro 1.83 Core Duo with 2 GB RAM, using both Nicholaz BE-s and the On Rez viewer, so it wasn't viewer dependent.

Usually SL eats all of one CPU. When things got bad I noticed that it was tending to switch to the other CPU. And the rendering rate on Fast Timers (is that the right viewer command-shift-9 in debug, I think) was off the screen! For CPU usage, I have Menu Meters 1.3 installed.

I have no idea if this will help anyone figure anything help, but would be willing to pass along more info to any Lindens or open source developers to try to help.

It seems like something is triggering this and not necessarily everywhere. Maybe an occlusion culling or similar issue. It does seem like SL will kick ass on 10.5 once this is figured out, based on the killer frame rates, which I haven't seen since I was on an empty island. ^.^

I installed Leopard on my 2.8ghz iMac, and it seems to be running fine. While framerate is pretty much the same as it was with Tiger, I do notice very little, if any, jitter and motion lag when rotating around the camera (in tiger, it was very jittery, and would even cause the game to pause for short periods of time.) When doing so, I notice that SL's CPU usage starts using both cores, as its process's CPU utilization goes to something like 130% or more. That's probably Leopard's improved, multi-threaded OpenGL implementation at work there.

However, there's still a few issues with it. VBO on the iMac's Radeon HD chipset is still not usable, if you enable VBO and move the camera around a bit, the game locks up tight. I did an OpenGL trace a while back, and found that some GL method (can't remember which one it was) was in an infinite loop eating 99% of the time allotted to OpenGL. Not sure if that's a bug in the SL Client or in the Open GL implementation itself. I had hoped that it would have been resolved in Leopard, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I cannot stress enough how important VBO is -- I compared statistics with my 1st gen macbook pro, and without VBO, it had half the triangle rate that the iMac had. Enabled VBO, and it left the iMac in the dust, exceeding it by a good 30-40%. This issue really needs to be addressed for there to be a good game experience on the new iMacs.

Also, I've noticed a huge discrepancy in triangles/sec statistics. I logged on two characters simultaneously, and tried to match what was on the screen between the two systems exactly. The PC, a 2.1ghz PC with 2G RAM, and a nVidia 7900GT-OC 256M video card was getting between 28,000 and 30,000 triangles a sec. The iMac, 2.8ghz, 2G RAM, and the 256M ATI Radeon HD was getting a mere 7,000 triangles a sec. Triangles/frame were pretty much equivalent between the two. But it resulted in a frame rate difference between 10-12fps and 30-60fps between the mac and pc.

While I can appreciate the fact that the nVidia is the better graphics engine, the shear difference in the triangle rendering rate between the two was utterly depressing. Is it really the fact that the nVidia chipset is that much better, or does the Mac SL Client (or OS/GL impl) need that much better optimizations?

I notice that when I am in a room like an empty room the frame rate is perfect but when I am around a lot of things the frame rate just goes really bad.

Also after a day of playing sl on my leopard I notice it is literally crashing my system so bad to where the whole screen greys out and I get that thing in different languages the mac power button icon telling me to restart my imac.

It seems to be getting worse.

Thanks for that bit of information, Windy. I had purchased a new iMac with Leopard and I am having those problems experienced. When the game environment loads for me, I am unable to move.

Other times, the environment fails to load completely.


Information on my graphics card.


When experiencing problems, the game looks like this--fails to load, etc.

Michi Lumin and I have matching MacBook Pros (2.4Ghz, 2GB of RAM, 256MB VRAM GeForce 8600M GT). I upgraded my machine to Leopard last night via archive & install, so it was pretty much clean.

When testing both the latest Release Candidate and the main client, we found no major difference in performance between Leopard and Tiger, both without the OpenGL Profiler workaround (Michi and I simply ran nothing else, which will work okay in Tiger). I have yet to experience the hard lock in Leopard, so I've not been using the OpenGL Profiler as of yet. Really, both will run fine until you hit some insanely complex geometry, like some of the overblown furry avs out there. Suddenly a few on a screen will tank both Tiger and Leopard.

Where it's interesting is when comparing Tiger/Leopard to XP with Bootcamp on the same hardware. The Windows client on the same settings and hardware will usually maintain double to triple the framerate. That's not really news, but we decided to test it anyway.

I did have some success with something today, I turned all my graphics settings down , so everything doesn't look great but it seems to be more stable and I'm getting a better frame rate, I turned off rippling water and also changed my graphic settings from 128 mb to 16 mb , things seem a little better. I'm going to continue to test this out and see if things stay ok.

Well ever since I downgraded my video settings all works well, things dont look that great but it's working much better! So if anyone else is having problems and wants to get sl to work try bringing down your graphics memory to 16 mb its not as choppy.

I can confirm also that the current SL client running on Leopard is terrible.

I am running an iMac 20" Core2Duo, 2 gigs of ram, I did a clean install of leopard and SL and its horrible, it runs at like 2 fps, and slows the entire computer down. Other than SL being a whiny bitch, everything else with the leopard upgrade works great.

Changing SL prefs for graphics do nothing. Turning down every setting to the lowest possible setting does nothing. Its not a graphics problem, its a CPU/RAM hogging problem.

I set my video memory to 64MB in preferences and now it's all much smoother, even if I get some occasional hangups every now and then, but those were there on Tiger as well... shrug