SL slow on Mac?

SL runs really slow on my Mac, mini G4 512. In fact, after some experience, I will stop using SL; there is just no fun. It looks like the system requirements are too low for running SL.
The strange thing is, that I have also a PC. Here, SL runs good. It is a Compaq with 1,7 intel processor, 384 MB. The mini should outclass the Compaq,. So I am puzzled.
I also find no complaints of other Mac/SL users. My question is, do I something wrong?
I welcome any suggestions, idea's or responds.

Prob to little memory.. in your Mac...My brother putted in lots more in mine and then all are great.,. (heaven)


But there are more into technical matters here in SL than I.. so wait for them,,,,

The problem with your mini is the video card. My iBook G4 has the same one - the ATI Radeon 9200. It's one of the minimum cards for Mac, and it is definitely handicapped. It doesn't have enough VRAM to provide a good SL experience, and it has many other shortcomings that make it a poor performer for SL. Sorry - I feel your pain. I think Linden Labs' estimates of system requirements are understated in general, and there is definitely a disparity in Windows and Mac performance on similar hardware, but I doubt a PC with a Radeon 9200 32 MB would play very well, either.

I finally got a new PowerBook G4 with the Radeon 9700. It's better. I'll do a separate thread about that.

SL runs very slow for me too. So, I usually just go some place and not move... That way it is tolerable.

Got two old Macs - a dual 533mhz/1.5Gb and a dual 1Ghz/2Gb - both are definitely let down badly by the supplied graphics cards (64 and 128 ATI respectively) Sadly there isn't, to my knowlege, a decent Mac compatible graphics card available for either.

However, I had the loan of a full house G5 last month (2 x 2.7Ghz, 8Gb, Nvidia 6800, 30" LCD) and was highly disapointed - very nice for detail work building - but in terms of actual SL day to day performance not as good as my PC (3.2Ghz Dual Core P4, 4GB, Nvidia 6800)...

I put most of the blame on the poor port of the SL client to Mac OSX. In theory the G5 ought to have been noticably faster/smoother than the PC - but it wasn't. To the point where, after half an hour I logged out and went onto the PC with a sigh of relief - though I did use the 30" LCD!

I was using identical graphics settings and card chipsets on both G5 and PC, so that wasn't the issue. The G5 had twice the RAM of the PC so lack of RAM buffering can hardly have been the issue. And two 2.7ghz G5s should have been faster than a single 3.2ghz dual core P4.

So it looks very much like the client is the real problem, with wimpish graphics chipsets on most Macs, especially earlier ones, being the close runner up.

Don't forget a most important potential weakest link - the quality and speed of your broadband connection. I recently switched from Charter Cable to Comcast. I have noted an even better SL experience since migrating to Comcast. I was always have problems with Charter and SL performance. Plus, Comcast gave me a brand new, latest model of the Motorol Surfboard modem.

While I have always preferred running SL on my fully loaded Dual G5 versus a very hefty 17" Toshiba laptop (also loaded), my SL experience with the 6 Mbit/sec broadband connection and the Motorola modem rocks.

The old cliche, "Only as strong as the weakest link", still applies.

I have an iMac G5, and was quite disappointed with the frame rate I was getting in SL. Last night I went into System Preferences/Sharing/Firewall. Firewall was on, and I wanted to leave it on, so I created a new profile used selected "Port Name: Other." Then, I put in the port numbers I got from the SL FAQ:

"18. Will my firewall prevent me from accessing Second Life?

Second Life needs to connect to ports 443/TCP, 12035/UDP, 12036/UDP, and 13000-13050/UDP. You should configure your firewall to allow outbound traffic on those ports, and related inbound traffic."

I put those numbers into the proper fields, put "Second Life" in the description, and clicked OK.

Then, out of curiosity, I clicked Advanced in the Firewall section. "Block UDP Traffic" was selected. I de-selected it. I think I may have done that myself, but I'm not sure.

After all of this was done, my frame rates in SL jumped considerably.

I hope this can be of some help.
Brynn

I've found out that Brent Linden's tips to improve Mac performance have been tremendously helpful to me and to most people I helped (in-world and off-world...) tweaking their Macs.

On my iBook (G4, 1.2ghz, OS X 10.4.4, 768MB) i'm thrilled. Very happy with the experience and have absolutely no lag issues or other weird issues. Just plain happy and enjoying it very much. I did try some of the Linden suggested Mac tips just to see and they made it even better.

I also tried it on our eMac (G4, 800mhz, OS X 10.4.4 768MB) and it actually worked in a window decently enough to get in, work on my builds and to converse with neighbors while I was home on a lunch break. That was very surprising.

We're getting ready to probably add 2 Mac Mini's for our kids and a new 20" iMac so this should add even more to the fun quotient.

Absolutely loving SL and can't believe how amazing this synthetic world is!

ML

The mac Mini is a great little office machine, but it is definitely below spec for SL.
If you are expecting to run SL, you should *not* buy a Mac Mini

While there are many factors here, I think there are some performance bottleneck issues with Mac OS X and its OpenGL implementation which are unavoidable at the moment. This has more to do with the OS than SL's client for Macs. It happens for other games and 3D apps on the Mac platform as well.

Improvement in SL but not overly dramatic. I got a dual G5 2gig with 2.5gigs of ram (ya I know, I need more ram

WoW goes like a banshee now with everthing turned on, I mean everything.

SL chugs along at 15fps now no matter what I put the settings at. I used to chug along at 10fp with my 9600XT and I couldn't do a lot of the things like lighting, etc , so it's an improvement. SL certainly looks much better with shiney, shadow goodness.

I bought the card for other reasons than SL performance and 15fps is fine for how I use SL, so no big deal, still it seems a bit odd.

Guess I should check my network settings (6 dl/784 ul DSL) to see if that may be the culprit.

Just wondering if I should be expecting better FPS or if this is par for the course?

I tried to run SL on my mac mini, just a simple no go. Don't bother.

On the other hand I get barely tolerable, but usable fps in busy areas with my G4 dual 500mHz (ATI 9000, and 2g of ram). go figure lol.

btw, that same old G4 runs WoW at a reliable 12fps, definately playable. But again, the mini has problems running it.

I've relegated my beloved mini to headless server status, which it performs admirably, and with much greater _quiet_ elegance than my old linux box ever did.

So does this trick now become unusable? That's shame.

Hmmmm. I'll have to try the trick Seagel pointed us to. Thanks for that link!

I'm also a Mac Mini user, and I will agree that the under-powered and un-replacable video card in the Mac Mini makes it a poor choice for running SL. It will run, yes, but not very well. It wouldn't surprise me that the OSX Client SW from LL isn't as good as the Wintel client SW. Mac is a much smaller share of the market, and developers often don't bother to try very hard to make their product work well on Mac, when porting it from Wintel.

Should be interesting to see what the new IntelDuo-based Macs do with SL. Especially if LL comes out with an SL Client that is specific for the new chipset and OS. Not holding my breath though. It will be quite some time before I can afford to replace my Mac Mini...

Well, I tried the trick Seagel pointed us to, with mixed and generally unacceptable results.

I downloaded the latest ATI control panel and the update for my rev of the OS, Rebooted the system, and told it to set SL to 'high performance'. Then I launched SL.

On the plus side, my textures loaded incredibly fast when I logged on! I could see almost everything as soon as the item itself rezzed, and was 'ready to play' far faster than before. I was very happy... for a few seconds...

On the down side? Well, I could hardly move! Movement was slow and jerky, completely unacceptable.

I logged off again, turned off the ATI settings override for SL, and when I logged back in, things were 'back to normal', without having to de-install the drivers or the System Preferences CP. Unfortunately that meant that while I could move passably well, I still had to wait forever for textures to load.

Oh well...

Definitely on my (reasonably) new iMac, SL performance is terrible. It's a 2.0Ghz G5, Radeon 9600 128MB, 1GB of RAM, etc - and even with all the quality settings turned all the way down, no other programs running, rasonably low resolution SL is unusable in anything but the simplest areas.

Areas with 10 or more people are especially slow - fps drops to 1-2, packet loss goes through the roof, and the interface becomes unusable. I've tried turning performance settings to max, etc.

I won't even talk about how pitiful it is on my 1.42Ghz G4 system =)

I have a ton of "modern" games that run great on this system - I'm sure it's not the hardware and that there's TONS of room for SL to improve. We need LL to invest some time into improving this.

That's utterly strange, Damien. I have installed SL on one of the first-generation eMac's — a G4 @ 800 MHz, and with 512 MB of RAM (or was it only 256 MB??). This is at the threshold of LL calls "minimum hardware", and the eMac certainly is able to get an average of 3-4 fps on most places, peaking to 5-6 on the more empty/less texture-intensive ones, without all settings at the lowest. I haven't tried to reduce the settings even more, but I'm quite sure the eMac can do 8 fps fairly easily if you follow the notecard tips.

My lowly, 2-year-old PowerBook G4 @ 1.25 MHz (768 MHz) gets 12-15 fps easily, 7-8 on the busy/texture-intensive areas. It seems to be rather sensitive to high and unpredictable packet loss, however. On a "clean" line (0% packet loss) I have to throttle down the bandwidth to perhaps 300 Kbps or less, or the CPU will simply fail to decode all those textures quickly enough. At home, I have a very lossy cable modem line (average is 6% packet loss, but it peaks to 15% often — yes, I know, my cable operator says "it's the way it works" and I'm moving to ADSL soon...), and the 500 Kbps setting seems to work better there. Again, I have all settings on "average", I could reduce them more to get even more improvement. And for taking pictures I raise the distance to 128, add the rippling effects, anisotopic filtering, and shadows — it's enough to get 3-4 fps, enough to take some fair looking pictures, and then lower the limits again to get the usual 7-8 fps on the busy areas.

So, having a brand-new G5 iMac, you should definitely get at least 25 fps everywhere, more on non-busy areas. Something must definitely be wrong with your settings. I wish I could help you out, because your report is really unusual.

I get 3-4 fps from the SL Linux version on a 5-year-old Pentium III @ 550 MHz, 256 MB RAM, and a first-generation Riva TNT card... the sort of hardware people laugh and scorn these days and leave to rot on corners... they're quite reasonable SL boxes, if you simply configure them properly.

And no, I haven't tried SL on my 1995 iMac (G3 @ 233 MHz, 192 MB RAM) yet but I'm pretty sure that with some patience (it needs several tricks) I'd be able to get it on SL as well, even if with only 1-2 fps

While I certainly agree that I'd like more performance from SL, a new renderer, and at least a trillion tiny things could definitely be improved, I don't think that SL is that bad. The difference perhaps to some games is that you need to tweak both SL and your computer a lot to get some extra performance. Yes, it's a pain. I agree with all that. But SL can work pretty well if you're patient with it!