bump map?

Hi,

I have a mac pro (intel) with ATI1900 i cannot enable bump mapping anone know why or how to correct this ? (neither can i enable avatar vertex program)

Z.

Hmmm. Well the options will only show up to be checked 'on or off' if the Second Life program thinks your hardware can use them.
{On the Mac, the ATI drivers seem to be the most stable and advanced. (On PC's the NVidia drivers seem better.)}

There's a table in SecondLife.app which shows you the graphics options that are turned on for each graphics card. (you can find this by RIGHT-CLICK on the SecondLife.app and 'Show Package Contents'. then in CONTENTS, look in RESOURCES at the feature_tables and the GPU_table) From what I can see, you SHOULD be able to turn these on.

Perhaps your prefs are bad?
Have you tried a reinstall? (including a delete of ~Library/Application Support/Second Life)

Hi,

I tried that still not vailable to me. Strange. I use latest version of OSX. the ATI drivers they are those that come wth OSX or are there others ? Anything else i can tr to fix it ?
Thank you for your answer and help.

Z.

I think i found out. My brand new mac pro intel 3ghz is reported by SL as unknown does this make it fall in the class 0 (unknown) (as mentioned in those tables) which has the lowest features enabled ?

Z.

I believe that ATI has a program that allows you to customize the driver settings on a per-applciation basis. perhaps this would help.

Hmmm...
Yes. If SL doesn't recognize your card, it sets it as type '0'.
Is your card in the list of recognized ones? (in the Secondlife.com package?)
If so, then bug report it to SL...the card SHOULD be recognized correctly.
If not, then bug report it to SL...they should ADD the card to the list.

(and if the latter, I'd try to edit the list manually to add my card...this would have to be redone every time SL changes the viewer...but you've got a nice machine...no reason not to have a nice SecondLife.

Hi Sterling,

Thanks for the info. I opened the file it looks a little cryptic here is my info :

CPU: 4 x i386 (Unknown) (2990 Mhz)
Memory: 2049 MB
OS Version: Darwin 8.8.4 Darwin Kernel Version 8.8.4: Sun Oct 29 15:26:54 PST 2006; root:xnu-792.16.4.obj~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
Graphics Card Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon X1900 OpenGL Engine
OpenGL Version: 2.0 ATI-1.4.46
LLMozLib Version: 1.1.0 (Mozilla GRE:1.8.0.8_0000000000)

could you tell me what line i should add to the GPU table ? I noticed spaces or tabs are important.

thanks so much,
Z.

So here's what should work:
That's supposedly the params for your X1900. The One's indicate 'supported'.

Is this machine new? Did you just move over from another mac?

Hi,

Yes brand new machine. N, switched from a PC.

Dont i need to change the the GPU_mac table also ? I have a feeling it is not recognizing my card correctly. What i have found out also is that it will not use class3 for my machine but looks at the list all one. Any idea what setting i should try in the gpu_mac table ?

And unfortunately because there is no ATI display panel setting wher ei can set AA for all gfx programs i cannot have AA in SL. Or do you know a workaround ?

Sofar SL and new mac intel pro with ATI 1900 is a bad experience : no decent gfx, no aa.

Hope we can figure this one out (and thanks for your help).

z.

A few things:

1. You Do NOT have to change anything to get SL to run...it should work straight away. The Preferences are all you should have to touch. The tables I was talking about are internal to the SL program...99.999% of the mac users don't know they are there (and need not know . I only looked into them to verify that bump mapping really was supposed to work for your particular mac configuration.

2. You have run 'Software Update' in the 'Apple' menu, right? ...just in case there's been a driver update?

3. Can you do a complete reinstall? Its easy enough, just delete 2 folders from the finder....

Then go out to Secondlife.com and download a new viewer.

4. If you get this far...then I only can think of two things...(I'm reaching now) but I'd do them in THIS order...
a-Create a brand new 'userid' on your mac. (use System Preferences under the Apple, and the ACCOUNTS tab.) login to THAT account, download SL and try it. (Logic: This new account will have NO other possible conflicts from other software.)
b-a reinstall of your OS..(from the DVD that came with it.) This is not as daunting as it sounds. And then try the new, clean userid...

5. You might have bad hardware...it happens. Are you near a mac store? If so, make an appointment with the Genius Bar and take it in. YOu've got a GREAT Mac...I drool...I think you're the first to have this problem, although I'll poke around in the forums some more.


And here are some threads...
/164/de/155224/1.html
/164/29/159195/1.html
/164/9f/151696/1.html
/164/c4/131286/1.html

Hi,

Thanks for all te info and tips. I went through all the threads basically they say t will run great on my machine, true i does.. speedwise. I went through your 5 steps (yes i did all 5 . And answer below what i found. (to bad LL doesnt seem aware of this or cant help out yet).
1. I know but i am also certain if i could enter the correct GPU SL would let me enable these otions, and i do like to try out whatever i can do make it work and get back to normal quality.
2. I did even dd what some suggested once a full update using the entire package.
3. Did that to a few times
4. a.tried that also
b. even did that one but nothing else installed but SL
5. did it all is perfect fine even tried SL out on a few other mac pro's with ATI 1900 same result

Step 5 now lets me believe that SL does NOT let us run Bumpmap on a mac ? (can anyone confirm they can activate bumpmapping (the option in preferences under avatar rendering either bum or bump+cloth) on a MAC osx intel and let me know which graphics card you use ?

Supposed to be a very good machine and great graphics card to run SL on but besides great speed am dissapointed i can not enable all features. (and i do miss antialias also anyone found a trick to enable that on a mac intel with a ATI card ?)

All by all it indeeds runs smooth but what am i with that if i cant have all the gfx options ?

Ill keep tring to debug , fiddle, dpwnload the dev kit try out that profiler and so on....

If you (and thank you so much for your kind help) or anyone else have any other ideas how i get SL to recognize my GFX card decently let me know.

Z.

Hmm you're right. My iMac has an X1600 and I can't turn on the feature either. I have an X1900 in my PC and it works great there. I'll look through debug mode when I have more time.

-peekay

Bad news unfortunately. At this time the avatar vertex program is not usable on any Mac, period. If you dig into the source code, you'll see in pipeline.cpp the RenderAvatarVP setting is forced to zero for all Darwin builds.

I've build a custom viewer enabling this feature, but with the shaders turned on the performance was abysmal (less than 2 fps!) The build was also unstable with the shaders on.

I found an entry in the Knowledge Base stating that the avatar vertex program is not supported on any Mac with an ATI graphics card (though from the source code, seems like it wont work with any card.)

The avatar vertex program is actually composed of several different shaders; I haven't had a chance to dig deeper and see if there is a particular one causing this issue, or if it's a more general problem.

-peekay

Hi Peekay,

Thanks for digging this one out, now i know i dont have to keep searching. NIce you are working on a custom vieuwer. Any chance you can add antialias setting to it as without some tricks you can not have the ATI pnael on a mac intel?

For those wanting the ATI panel on their mac intel (with ATI XT1900 card) do this : http://www.macgeekery.com/hacks/software/ati_displays_utility_on_a_mac_pro i just did this and am running really nice AA. at least something i can have .... now lets hope a miracle happens and the avatar vertex program does get fixed. Cant be that it is not possible.

Anyways thanks for all the research, maybe we find more solutions ?

Z.

the clothes and bump mapping optoins for avatar rendering is only available now with the avatar vertex option. When they changes some stuff around on the back end and that became that way, the Lindens said they had to disable it on all Macs because it ran horribly otherwise and was unplayable, and they couldnt figure out why. Since Mac isnt as *important* as Windows... it was just disabled and forgotten about instead of figured out.