Leopard +Mac Pro + SL = Unplayable

Hi,

My system: Mac Pro Twin 3.0 Dual-Core Intel Xeon 4 gigs RAM, Radeon x1900

I upgraded to Leopard (10.5) and SL degraded into a wretched nightmare. I was Ruthed nearly all the time, I could not TP, I was get 1-3 on bandwidth...no inventory...horrible...unplayable.

To troubleshoot I fired up my Macbook Pro w/o Leopard and all was well in my SL world.

I read the posts here and reduced my Graphic Card Memory from 512 to 16 mb and now my Mac Pro under Leopard plays SL fine although the cooling fans seem to have to be in high all the time now, those 16 mbs must be cooking.

In short, something is amiss with SL and Leopard. I hope LL can do something about it.

Szabo

Only surprise was that Ruth kinda grew on me....that says more about me than my Mac!

You should be able to set the card to 256 MB - half the actual VRAM, and still work. I can't imagine why you'd have to go as low as 16!

Update:

I got so frustrated I called Live Help.

The Ruth problem was resolved by running: Client>Character>Test which reverted my avitar back to its original shape and look but by doing that and then putting my skin, shape, etc back on everything is fine.

I reset my vid card to 256 seems to work ok.

Only difference now is fans run higher almost all the time now when before it was an occasional thing...go figure.

Glad to hear it is working now! What frame rates are you getting? I hope that later today I'll finally be placing an order for a Mac Pro very similar to yours.

*Crosses fingers* Well, I'll have my own answer on frame rate soon. Ordered my Mac Pro Tower today!

Um, not to be annoying, but...

Running a laptop with your fans running on high is a BAD thing. It signifies that your laptop is trying to disperse heat and is having a hard time keeping everything cool.

He's got a mac pro, thats not a laptop

I have been using windlight under leopard and it's has been working fine. Regular sl wouldn't work under leopard for me at all.

Mmmm that's an Interesting tip, I have a 2.66 Mac Pro with 3Gb and x1900

I've been having an increase in client crashing due to teleporting and cam-turning under Leopard and also the occasional Ruthing which I never had before.

I'll try your tip about cutting VRAM down to 256Mb, not sure why that should help though, or why it should be necessary to handicap the card

Windlight won't run *at all* under Leopard for me now, just insta-quits, whereas the standard client SL does run. I can run Windlight under Vista in Bootcamp though.

WOO HOO! My new Mac Pro arrived yesterday!

Specifications

Two 2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon
2GB (4 x 512MB)
250GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB (2 x dual-link DVI)
One 16x SuperDrive
Apple Keyboard and Mighty Mouse - U.S. English
Mac OS X - U.S. English (10.5, Leopard)

Following the advice from the forums, I told SL to only use 256 of the 512 MB VRAM.

No crashes so far, and with the official client I'm getting 32 to 42 FPS! WOW! I can SEE and MOVE! Tried Windlight and got good results there as well, though not quite as high a frame rate. No crashes, and the only issues were the lighting glitches that they are still complaining about. I could see both sky and water effects just fine. I was wearing a 'low lag" Human avatar with non-prim hair and no scripted attachments.

The Blog says there will be new drivers out for the ATI X1900 XT this month, that they hope will allow us to use the full VRAM on the card.

Further update:

Last night I decided to really push the limits. Logged in with FOUR seperate instances of SL at once, my main and three alts, each running a furry avatar with scripted attachments (swords that could be drawn, tails that can wag or curl, heads that can show facial and ear expressions...). Then my Partner and I had two visitors over, so we had a total of seven furry avatars there, in close proximity, all of which were wearing scripted attachments of one sort or another. This is in a Class 5 sim that is almost at its prim limits in terms of building complexity.

Standard client, with all graphics settings pushed to the max, but the VRAM setting for each client set to 256 - half of the 512 available on the card.

And I was still consistently getting 19 to 20 FPS on all 4 logins!

I didn't check to see if it was running on all 4 cores, or only one. Not really sure how to check that. But it ran really well, and the only crash was when starting up a few of the multiple clients. Sometimes starting a new one would crash one that was already logged in. But once all four were up, it ran like a Swiss watch.