How to increase fps on a Mac?

O.k. so this is only my 2nd post ever, so please don't flame me! I have an iMac G5, 1.8GHz, 512mb memory, nVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 video card with 64mb of VRAM.

I finially got a very kind Mac user in SL to help me get my settings straight after the new release, but it seems for both of us our fps is VERY low, something between 5-10fps. My PC friends are getting 30+. Is this just a "feature" of a Mac that I should accept? Or is there something that I can do to improve this number?

Before you give me very technical directions, know that I am very NON technical. So make this the Mac's for dummies explaination.

Thank you

I'm on the same configuration. 5-10 fps is what I'm mostly seeing with 1.10.0 (34). It's rather better than the 3-4 fps I was generally getting with 1.9.

The biggest problem we face seems to be the video RAM. 64 MiB is limiting, but there's no easy way for us to boost that without getting a new machine. There are other technical issues, too, but mostly I think you'll need to live with your current performance, or get a new machine.

Drop draw distance, it won't make so much of a difference as it did pre 1.10, but I played with the minimum draw distance on a Dual 2.5ghz PowerMac G5 with 256mb NVidia 6800 Ultra in order to get playable FPS (though I had things like shiny water and full object detail).

On that note, turning down object detail will help, I never noticed any difference when turning down avatar detail (well, it looked worse but performed the same). Lowering tree detail couldn't hurt either I suppose.

Turn off shiny water on your card I think, as it can slow you down, though it does look awesome.

Aside from that, the biggest boost can come from taking advantage of occlussion culling, if you built your own home then make sure there are no gaps in the walls that would cause it to render things outside, I find that building by numbers (using the co-ordinates in the object tab of the edit window) allowed me to build morep precisely and has worked well for OC.

Caragh,

I'm also on the same setup as you are except with 1gb of ram. Would appreciate it if you could let us know what you've done with your settings to improve performance with your iMac?

More memory! 512Mb is just not enough to run OS X efficiently let alone OS X + a resource hog like SL...

Without enough memory in your machine you will never achieve anything like a respectable efficiency. You need 1 gigabyte at least! Without it you can mess all you like with SL's preferences and you'll see little if any improvement.

On my 15" G4 Powerbook, I would get anything from 5 to 25 fps, I don't believe it's reasonable to expect more than that from a pre-Intel Mac in SL.

Also, graphics card memory is crucial, if you only have 64meg in your graphics card that is your biggest bottleneck and there's nothing you can do except get a newer machine. SL since at least 1.9 has not worked well with less than 128meg cards. I would suggest a 256 meg gfx card minimum for good performance.

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