What Kind of Apple Hardware Do You Have?

Sorry, I didn't see this sooner. Rezzing is vastly improved, takes harldy anytime. I get over 20 fps most of the time. I went to Centreville with no problem. My home sim is laggy and has an under 200 fps. But when I'm on the Powermac, I hardly notice. Makes it frustrating when I'm at work on my Powerbook.

I began SL on 'Nimue', a Sawtooth G4, upgraded with Sonnet 1.25Ghz CPU, 1.5Gb RAM, ATI Radeon 8500.

SL ran OK though rather sluggishly and prompted me to upgrade rather sooner than intended to my present system, 'Isis', which I love to bits, dote on, gaze at with big wide eyes and worship every night before I turn in for bed

Power Mac G5 dual 2.5Ghz (liquid cooling)
1.25Ghz frontside bus per processor
2Gb DDR RAM
160Gb + 250Gb S-ATA hard drives
8X DVD-RW Superdrive
ATI Radeon X800 XT 256Mb graphics card. AGP 8X

LG 1920P 19" TFT monitor running at 1280 x 1024
Logitech MX310 mouse
Lacie 24X Firewire CD-RW
Iomega Zip750 Firewire

Netgear DG834G router on 1Mbps broadband, with 2Mbps optional FLEX boost

Running Mac OS 10.3.9, about to upgrade to Tiger at time of writing.....

The system did start out with an Nvidia Geforce 6800 Ultra graphics card which gave me graphics corruption problems - a topic absolutely hammered to death in another thread. I'd be quite interested to know if the new drivers in Tiger have finally fixed this incompatibility. Anyway, I'm uber-happy with my X800 now !

Just started World of Warcraft - all is smooth as silk

Yeah I also have a Performa 6320, Color Classic and original Mac Classic, but those not much good for SL, and I've now sold my faithful G4 (*cries*) to part pay for a Volkswagen Polo, which at least helps to get me away from SL from time to time

Comparison wise, for SL the system is a huge leap up in usability from my previous system, in terms of client responsiveness, movement, rendering etc, but there are still seemingly SL specific things which slow me down sometimes, like the often reported random cumulative lagging effect which gets cured by relogging. Also, I sometimes get momentary 'pauses' in movement accompanied by the sound of the hard disk being accessed, though this seems to have become less noticeable since I reduced my SL disk cache size

More multi-threading to better use the dual processors would be nice if feasible. I've tried logging in with two avatars using two instances of SL on the one machine and experienced surprisingly little slowdown whilst both processors are visibly kept busy. This maybe shows how much extra grunt is there to be used

Hey would a MacMini be powerful enough to run SL? The only thing that might not be up to par is the meager video card the MacMinis have with only 32megs of video ram. Well assuming it's even a card; I think everything in these new machines is integrated.

I'm very glad to hear that the X800 works as well as you say. I know you were struggling with the nVidia for quite a while there.

You -might- have problems with the video ram. I've got an eMac at home, and it's not really up to par for Second Life (although 1.6 shows some improvement!) The biggest burden might be the processor but the low video ram can't help.

I've played SL on a G5 with a 23" Cinema Display and it made me sick with jealousy. The dual 1.2Ghz G4 I'm on right now seems to render it pretty well.

If all goes well I'll be getting a 12" Powerbook by the end of the month, so I'm hoping that will be able to render SL passably.

Yeah Pol, life in SL is easier now since I bit the bullet and changed out that dratted card (though to be fair to Nvidia it was absolutely spiffing for everything else) and as I actually made 300 quid for the Nvidia 6800 on eBay anyway, the 340 quid or so for the ATI X800 really wasn't so bad a pill to swallow, and it is nice to have the ATI control panel too.

Oh yeah, the big stripy Tiger is working great - very simple system upgrade with Archive and Install, no compatibility issues at all with SL, or anything else of note after updating all my shareware apps to suit.

Who's gonna be the first SL user to splash out on the new dual 2.7 then ? Or is everyone waiting it out now with the temptation of dual core CPUs and PCI-e

Re: the Mac Mini, I would imagine that 32Mb graphics-card to be a potential bottleneck. I know when I briefly tried even a 64Mb card in my G5 (whilst faultfinding) that I found it astonishing how much it slowed SL down - it made my G5 feel not much faster than my old G4 had been running SL. Best to try one if you can, or get some feedback from a Mini owner I guess though.

I am using a 1.2GHz iBook with 512MByte RAM and 32MByte Video RAM. Quite similar to a miniMac I'd say. Well, I would be better off with at least 768MByte of RAM (poor HD is swapping like hell when I open a browser window as well), and the Videocard makes me cry quietly. Best I ever had in an empty sim with really poor settings were 8 fps, usually I am glad not to hit ALL walls with 2-4 fps
Windows is not an option, so it might be that I will have to try the watercooled 2 x 2.7 GHz monster with some Gigs of mem and that ATI 9850. *cries*

I ran into two issues with archive and install. First, because I have to test my web designs on Internet Exploder on Windoze, I have a KVM switch so that I can use the same keyboard and mouse for both my Mac and my wintel box. When I upgraded to Tiger, every time I switched back to the Mac the system would pop up the "helpful" keyboard assistant. The latest system update fixed that issue. Also, I had to reinstall Photoshop because the file associations got hosed, but that's not really a Tiger issue.


I'm really tempted by the rumors of dual core, but the one thing that gives me pause (besides having to wait for the machines to actually come out) is that sensible computer users usually wait a revision or two before taking the plunge into a new processor technology. The big question is: am I sensible? Er...


I ran SL on my brother's Mac mini. He had boosted the RAM on it to 1gig. It ran...okay. FPS was not good, but I could do stuff, move around, etc. Because I'm all about the bling, I even turned on shiny. Anyway, not a particularly good SL machine, but it can be used if you don't mind chunky framerates.

Yo.

G5, DP 1.8 GHz

Only 64 MB of VRAM, though, so SL isn't all that snappy for me.

The new G5's have lovely specs. I look forward to finishing college and making money so that I can keep my desktop machine top of the line each year. I've had good success in selling off my old machines, making the actual upgrade costs no more than half of the new machine.

What you need to do is get 1gb Ram. SL needs 1gb with Tiger OS X. That said there us a trick to turn on Quartz Extreme 2d for the radeon 9200 which involves hacking the plist file. Full details are in the quartz extreme section of my web site at http://macguru.biz/osxtips.html under the quartz extreme section. That tip plus 1gb ram should do okay. Beyond that you could get an external firewire drive 7200 rpm and use carbon copy cloner or Apple's own disk utility to copy your data over to the new drive and boot and run from that. Newegg.com also has samsung memory for the mini at a great price and a swell rosewill firewire enclosure (look uinder the Mac section for that) if you would you want to build your own firewire drive with an 8mb cache rather than the current 2mb cache versions most commercial firewire drives come with.
I plan to do all of the above, and will gladly build a firewire drive for anyone who wishes one for a small fee. Thing is it's much easier and inexpensive to build an external firewire drive than to go to the hassle of buying a smaller 2.5 inch 7200 rpm drive, then installing it internally on the Mini.
I should expect an average of 4 fps with 1gb ram on a 1.42 ghz, maybe 5-6 fps with the firewire drive option. The fact that the Mac client is so slow is inexcusable due to poor coding, and will likely drive away a LOT of potential new users fropm SL. For myself I will not go over a basic membership until I have satisfactory performance from Linden Labs for what should be a RELEASE client software which is nothing more than betaware. I however will explain to SL just as i will with any end user WHAT has to be done to make it all work properly.

Definitely put as much ram as you can into your iBook....1gb if you can 768 if you have to. Also if you have Tiger installed you could enable quartz extreme 2d in software mode on the quartz extreme section of my page at http://macguru.biz/osxtips.html
Beyond that you could get and install a faster internal hard drive. Seagate just came out with a 100gb 7200 rpm hard drive for laptops. Also there is a hitachi 60gb model also at 7200 rpm. Assuming you want to keep it portable and not be tied to an external firewire drive. More expensive but you do pay for portability in a laptop.

The real issues with the Mac Mini are that SL needs 1gb Ram to run and also the hard drive spins at 4200 rpm. I plan to do an external hard drive firewire at 7200 rpm with a rosewill case and an 8mb cache Maxtor drive. Also others have posted that they don't get THAT much better performance with a G5 over a G4. This is because SL has beta quality code on the Mac OS X client. Linden Labs needs to be REAL nice to Apple and beg them to share some decent Open GL code and some Quartz GL code for Tiger in order to make the software work. Quickdraw dosen't get it done. Quartz GL or as Apple calls it Quartz Extreme 2d is the way to go. Your SL software runs chunky frame rates because Quickdraw is what Linden has for rendering 2d NOT Quartz Extreme 2d as what Tiger uses for 2d rendering. Your 3d renders fairly well but the client software chokes on rendering 2d surfaces on 3d. Now you know why.

I doubt LL would even have to be all that nice...rumor has it that Apple is beginning a serious initiative to make their OpenGL implementation world-class. I suspect they'd be happy to share knowledge & code with 3D developers.

MAC Mini
1GB DDR400
40GB HDD
Combo Drive
Wireless & BT

SL seems to work just fine. In really complex areas it slows but it did on my PC too. There is NO way I would ever go back to Windows after being on a MAC for five days. How I ever survived I will never know.

Welcome to the fold. I guess I'll have to reevaluate my previous thoughts on the Mac Mini and SL. Thanks for the info.

The real trick is RAM-it needs to be at 1gb or better whatever Linden Labs thinks at 512mb ram they are joking. SL needs 1gb. Also the strongest video card you can use. If you have a G4 equipped Mac and less video gpu than a rdeon 9600 nvidia 5200 or on a laptop a radeon 9700 you need to look at http://macguru.biz/osxtips.html and look at enabling Quartz Extreme 2d thru software in Tiger which is 5 times faster render than quickdraw. Tiger only for that hack. Helps with drawing the 2d surfaces on SL.
For Mac Mini users beyond 1gb ram which is a noticeable performance upgrade over 512mb ram try getting an external firewire drive and cloning your hard drive over to it ( and booting from the firewire drive) with carbon copy cloner...as a 7200 rpm hard drive will remove yet another performance bottleneck which will give the Mini really fine performance and make it a very competent machine. On a powerbook to do this would require installing a 7200 rpm internal hard drive. Not tryiong to be redundant just want to make dead sure Mac SL uswers can get a decent really good experience from SL until Linden Labs gets it's code together.

So I guess I shouldn't attempt running SL on my Powerbook 145b? Heh. That computer is as old as my dang car.... going on 13 years

I am looking into a mac mini to get reaquainted iwth the mac systems. Interesting thread

--BL

I know the strength of a chain is in its weakest link, but I should warn that when I upgraded my 1.25GHz machine from 512MB to 1GB of ram, the improvement with SL was definitely marginal and disappointing. Video card has 64MB. Maybe that is my bottleneck.

Download ATI Displays 4.5.1 install then under 3D open gl override option select Second Life and set it to minimum. If you like you can get ATICellerator 1.05 and run it at 10 percent or so overclock. The main thing is the ati utilities 4.5.1 because it has the capability to set overrides for the gpu.

https://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894

for the ATICellerator software.....

http://thomas.perrier.name/software/ATIcceleratorII.html

This really helps with Second Life as you can finally get something that works. Beyond this I am purchasing a 120gb firewire hard drive and will clone then erase my internal hard drive over to the 7200 rpm 8mb cache drive and will expect another 15% improvement over the stock 4200 rpm 2.5 inch internal hard drive.

I love my powerbook G4 1.5Ghz. It's got 1G of RAM and does everything just fine except SL.

I have a windows laptop for work with very similar hardware specs (virtually identical, other than a 3Ghz Pentium-M versus a 1.5Ghz G4) and it runs SL much smoother than the mac ever does.

I really believe there is a memory leak of some sort in the most recent (1.6.7) release. If I play on SL for any length of time, the framerate drops and drops and drops until an hour or so when the whole thing tanks.

I'm pretty disappointed really. I'd love to be able to stay on the mac and not have to deal with the windows nonsense. Maybe when 1.7 is released...