Intel iMac, Avatar Vertex, and Bump Mapping

I notice that in the Universal Binary of Second Life running in MacOSX, I don't get access to Avatar Vertex Program, and Bump Mapping. However, if I reboot my system with Boot Camp and run Second Life from Windows XP, I get access to those very features. The graphics card is the same either way. Just wondering why there is that difference?

iMac Core Duo, 17", 1.8GHz, 2GB ram, fully updated SL client and OSX system software

There's some problem that SL have getting avatar vertex rendering to work under OS X, and some other issues too. In fact on some graphics cards AVP has been unavailable or unusable if available for over a year.

Not quite sure why, just one of those fun things about being a mac user in SL. (We still get a more stable connection on average though.)

I'm having the same problems on a MacBook Pro with a Radeon X1600. I'm not used to it because I've had Avatar Vertex Program on for the better part of, well, almost my whole Second Life! Wish there were more configurable graphics drivers too.

Thank you Torley Linden for your thoughts.
But how about some sympathy for us, and a butt kick to whoever sets development priorities?
I have a top end 6 month old Mac with gigs o' memory.

I've got the Prefs on the Mac pulled down to where nothing rezs unless I touch it, I have particles hidden, and have spent hours tuning my connection speed to try to eliminate dropped packets.

AND YET: Mac runs more slowly than an embarrassingly old 3 year old windoze laptop with 512k...

How about some real mac support

I'm going to check with Brent Linden to learn from what insights he has on this--he's a true Mac enthusiast!

Ah, the age-old "Why can't Macs use Avatar Vertex Program" problem (or better known as "Why does my avatar have it's head up it's butt on a Mac?". Runitai Linden spent 2 solid weeks trying to get the shaders working on the Mac but was unable to because Apple's implementation of GLSL (the shader language we use) is more prone to fallback to software emulation mode, causing severe perfomance penalties. If you tried out the 1.8 Preview on a Mac you saw we did have support for shaders in but your framerate was painfully low. Rather than put you all through the pain of a 3 FPS experience (no comments from the 60+ avatars-inna-club crowd, thank you!) it was decided to pull the support entirely until Apple's drivers better support GLSL.

I think the problem is that Apple's drivers support GLSL too well . Apple has put a lot of effort into hiding the vagaries of the GPU implementation... the upside being that you don't have some video cards (ATI, no?) breaking completely on the Mac. The downside is awful performance when it would otherwise break (3 FPS? My Mac mini wished it could do that well).

One of the reasons I have a MacBook Pro is because I like options. Give me the option to "check the box" and see for myself the 3 fps. I may or may not have problems, but at least I get to decide what my "experience" is like for myself.

Haley