IS THIS THE END OF Second Life FOR MANY NEW MAC OWNERS?

From what ive read and been told in many SL groups, theSecondlife Viewer will never work properlly on a New Intel Macbook or Mac Mini??

Does this mean a large group of the Mac community will never get to play SL, its on exclusive to those with Pro macs and money enough to gain all the MEGA upgrades???

Wont this make the SL mac community even smaller and eventually not important enough to support at all? especially since the Pro Macs can easily boot up in windows now negating the need for a Mac Viewer?

Any intel mac can boot into Windows, using Apple's BootCamp.

As for "not working properly", the Intel graphics chipset used in plastic MacBooks and Intel Minis is not officially supported by Second Life, Windows or Mac side. There are a few people have tried SL on MacBooks and Minis, poke through the threads in this forum to see what's up with them.

That said, the Intel integrated graphics on both the Mini and the plastic Macbook is really rather crap for running things like SL, even if it were supported. 64MB shared VRAM will kill performance, and it's not really meant for gaming. Regardless of support or not, you're going to experience reduced performance on such weak hardware.

It's not LL's fault, it's Apple, for not putting a dedicated graphcis solution in either of these machines. The Radeon Mobility 9700 they used in the last generation of Aluminium powerbooks would be a great addition to the MacBooks, but I don't see anything happening on that front in a while.

In the meanwhile, the iMac has a dedicated Radeon X1600 in it, and will handle SL quite well. It's an entry level computer, just a tetch more expensive than a Mini.

Cheers!

CCC

That's the problem with early-adoption of the machines, you should always wait until at least the first revision when Apple addresses the consumer responses.
But the Mac Minis and MacBooks are not gaming machines, they are meant to be budget computers for simple needs.

However, the Intel Chip must have decent OpenGL support, so it remains to be seen if SL will actually stop working on it later on or not, but yeah, it's gonna be a bit slow.

Why Apples "fault" ? They are very clear about the specification of their machines, if they weren't just imagine the legal trouble they'd get into.

The fault, if any, lies with people who purchase hardware without doing the proper research.

RTFM people !

or in this case RTFS where S = specifications.

or at the very least, read a few product reviews before making a purchase decision!

And that's not meant pejoratively, it's good advice in this case, would you buy a small familly car and expect the performance of a supercar ? no, of course not.

*

dont matter whos fault it is, the question is what will happen next. Will SL players who bought a macbook or mac mini stop playing SL or will they find a way to cope with the poor support from apple and Linden in this area? - just like to see if anyone comes up with sumfin other than, buy a pc or buy a better mac then upgrade all the cards and ram....

... deleted strange double post !

There's not many other choices. Even if LL were to make the client as efficient as they possibly could, it still all boils down to the power of the hardware it's running on.

I think you're almost answering your own question... can you yourself find some way to enjoy SL without worrying about performance ? If you can you'll stay if not you won't.

Since I came to SL I've never had what I'd call a good performance but even when I was lagging out around clubs at 1fps or worse I still found myself coming back! It all depends on what you want from the place. After a while I got bored with the club scene and found a niche of my own to settle into, I'm not unique in that, it's eventually what happens to everyone. I'm not particulary happy with a low frame rate and lag but I still find I enjoy being in SL. Point being, SL is what you make of it, not what other people make of it for you, blaming poor support for inadequate hardware won't get you out of the rut you find yourself in it'll just stress you out!

Admittedly if you've invested much time and effort into the place it does become extremely hard to leave, but if you've invested time and effort, the chances are you've invested in the hardware to do it on too. And it's annoying and upsetting when the ground rules change but that's always been the case in SL. SL is like a permanant beta test of new technology and requires more and more from our machines with every update ( or downdate ! ). That's the nature of the beast we just have to accept it. LL need to make a decision with each move what they consider acceptable losses and I guess with 200,000 or so residents, they think those with low end hardware are an acceptable loss.

Does it really matter at the end of the day ? Is it worth getting stressed over ? After all there's a million and one other sources of entertainment available to you outside SL and you can always come back again later at any time.

It might! But I doubt it. Many LL staff use macs themselves, they're an unusually Mac savvy company !

Personally speaking, as a Mac user who has no intention of changing to windows for my day to day use, I'd find it just about acceptable to run an XP version of SL on my Mac. In fact one of the reasons I'd install XP on a Mac would be to play games that weren't available before. Being able to run PC applications is one of the great new advantages of Intel Macs and no way does it mean less choice for Mac users, games have always been the domain of the PC. I'll worry when and if developers stop developing other software for Mac, or if OpenGL loses out completely to DirectX, or if unix gives way wholly to windows, but that doesn't seem to be the case, at the moment OS X and other unix based markets are still slowly growing.

It looks to me like LL have a commitment to platforms other than windows and that makes LL special and worth supporting.

The least expensive Mac option for good SL performance seems to be the iMac. The Mac Mini functions, poorly, but it functions. If I were on a tight budget and planned to buy a new Mac for the purpose of playing SL, I'd buy an iMac. It at least has a card that SL will officially support.

Technically, Mac Minis and Macbooks never have been 'supported' by SL. And the new Intel Macs that have Intel integrated graphics are not either. But from what I hear, those same Mac Minis and MacBooks with the Intel graphics seem to work passibly well.

As much as I like Mac, however, a Windows PC is a cheaper alternative for an SL gaming station. SO if your Mac is fine for everything else, and if you have the room in your home to set up another computer, it might be cheaper to buy a PC clone and just use it for SL.

I have to agree with Ceera. You can build a decent Windows PC that'll run SL for the price of a Mac Mini... and buy the keyboard, mouse, and monitor.

Hello all!
I just picked up my MacBook this evening. All I have to say is that SL runs better on this than it ever did on my PowerBook G4 with 128mb dedicated graphics card. I had 1.5gb RAM on the PB and I have 2gb RAM in this sexy beast.

Cheers!
Hiro

Exactement, Haravikk.... I am waiting for the monster Intel Mac desktops. In the meantime the Dual G5 and ATI Pro Mac Edition (256) card, along with the 8Mbit connection, work very well for me.

Ooohhhh... Which one did you get? (I am definitely looking at replacing mine, as I suspect any MacBook might give a speed increase over my PB G4, which has only 64 MB VRAM.)

MacBook Pro, 2 gig memory, 7200 rpm HD, so far the lowest frame rate I've had anywhere I've been is around 10fps. Up in my skypad it's 35 - 60 fps. Down on the ground anywhere in Svarga it's averaging 25+ fps.

These figures are with 256m viewing distance and all other options on and set to full quality.

I'm happy way better than the old G4.

But, if i didn't need a Mac for my RL work I'd probably get a cheaper PC if it was just for SL.

I'm not sure what OS Runitai Linden was running when he visited a couple of days ago to investigate the 50% fps loss I've suffered under 1.10, but he stated he was using a MacBook Pro... I didn't think anything of it, because I didn't realise there were issues with these machines.

And doing a LOT better than I was too!

I hesitate to suggest anyone IM him about this because I know he's a busy guy - but maybe he could shed a little light here?

Did you mean Macbook or MacBook Pro ? The smaller Macbooks are somewhat under specced but I'm very pleased with performance on the Pro. It might be even better when Apple improve their OpenGL performance further.

I'm fairly sure he said he was using a MacBook Pro - but can't honestly swear to it.
It was just a casual enquiry I made when we were checking graphics settings, fov and similar to ensure we were comparing orances to oranges so to speak.

The Pro has a dedicated graphics card, and should run SL very, very well. This discussion is about the MacBook (as in, NOT the MacBook Pro) and the Mac mini (as in, NOT the iMac), which do NOT have dedicated graphics cards. Has anyone tried running SL on either of those, and if so, how is it?

I have a Black MacBook with the stock Harddrive (I'm going to upgrade later with a 7200 RPM drive) and 2gb RAM. You can get 2gbs for a very reasonable price, too. I got mine through Ramseeker - Omni brand. It works very well. I've only had it 1 day, but so far this thing is amazing!

Please define "well"

What kind of FPS in what kind of areas, with what graphics settings? The black one is looking really cool, only it doesn't have dedicated VRAM or ATI/nVidea graphics, which is why I'm concerned.

The MacBook Pro have a PCI-Express ATI X1600 256MB GDDR3 ...
Of course it run perfectly !!

Nice. For the record, the base MacBook Pros have "only" 128 MB of VRAM. (My PowerBook G4 1.33 17", as a contrast has 64 MB and the last iBook G4 12" had only 32 MB)

Yes, it also comes with only 512Mb memory, perhaps that helps explain why some people have been talking about low performance on Pros. It's always worth getting a 1Gb memory module so you can buy another cheaper later without having to throw away a 512. Whether or not it's worth paying the extra for 128Mb VRAM, personally I think it is. No point in having a good machine throttled.

I have a 2 Ghz Intel Duo with 2 gigs ram MacBook Pro. Ummm, SL runs great on this machine. At my studio I have a G5 twin 2.7 Ghz machine and SL gives me only 8-12 FPS. On the MacBook I get really high FPS....like 28-38 depending on the Sim. SL seems to run as well if not better then my expirence of SL on IBM's. Only two issues, occasionly SL on the MacBook Pro gets stuck in reverse, my avie just want to fly or run backwards. Sometimes it resolves itself, sometimes I need to relog. The other issue, on both my Macs, the new lighting tends to "pop" on when I get within the radius of the source light. Really stupid looking if you ask me. Overall SL runs just great on my MacBook Pro.

I know someone with an Intel Mac Mini, and SL does indeed run on it, just not very fast.

The same is true with PCs that have crappy integrated graphics; you should do better research before buying your machines!

-Z