NVidia cards (7300, etc) will crash SL on a Mac Pro or 64-bit iMac

Hey all.

Earlier on my new Mac Pro, I found Second Life unusuable on my machine. I had 4GB of RAM and a Nvidia 7300 GT card.

If I ran with 4GB enabled, SL would kernel panic constantly. If I ran in 2GB, the game was slow as molasses. I had no problem in Windows using BootCamp.

Later, I got a Radeon X1900 card. On top of it being insanely fast, I can run it in SL just fine with no crashes and with all my 4GB RAM enabled. It isn't slow, and it rarely if ever crashes.

Back in the day, I thought it might be a graphics driver or something to do with the 64-bitness of the Mac Pro (and the new iMacs.) Turns out I was right.

World of Warcraft users were also seeing crashes with Mac Pros and the same graphics card. Radeon users were more or less unaffected. The crashes were always in the graphics driver.

I was reading the Parallels forums, and found this very interesting info that may be of some use to Linden Labs:

[from the Parallels team deconstructing the kernel panics posted:

This panic was caused by “com.apple.GeForce” driver, installed in your system.
It caused "getPhysicalSegment() out of 32b range" panic.

This panic is called inside the implementation of Apple IOMemoryDescriptor class
as the result of "high" memory allocated with legacy "getPhysicalSegment" method.

So, the only reason of this panic is "non-64-bit-ready" GeForce driver, that called
legacy IOMemoryDescriptor::getPhysicalSegment() method. The best solution here
will be to file a bug with your driver manufacturer and recommend to use the
IOMemoryDescriptor::getPhysicalSegment64() call.]

[from another user, relaying Blizzard's feeback:

You're absolutely right, and I erroenously pointed the finger at you guys. In fact, a tech support guy from Blizzard confirmed that they have an open ticket with Apple and Nvidia about this very problem. The video drivers that Nvidia has provided to Apple for inclusion in OSX are riddled with bugs. The TSR even confirmed that this problem happens with *many* games and other apps that make heavy use of graphics hardware, and that it's simply a coincidence that I noticed it happening whilst using Parallels. Let me share the email I received from the Blizzard employee:
--------
Hello,

This is already a known bug that has been filed with both Apple and Nvidia. It is a driver issue and all I can suggest is setting your RAM to be recognized as 2GB at this time.

Sincerely,

Justin K.
Blizzard Entertainment
Technical Support Representative]

Bottom line... it's your graphics card. For now, run in 2GB or less mode, or get a Radeon X1900. Believe me, it's worth it... that card is FAST!

Hey, good work Bethanee - although not all that encouraging for someone who has a replacement 24" iMac, with 256 Nvidia card, arriving today. (The last one got a hardware failure after five days and wouldn't even boot from an install CD).

At least it is a problem that CAN be fixed. I suppose it's a question of when.

Do we need to put pressure on Apple / NVIDIA - by bombarding them with complaints and bug reports? Should we co-ordinate this somehow? Make a real pain of ourselves until someone gets their finger out?

Anyone got any ideas how best to do this?

Have you upgraded to 10.4.8 yet? A lot of the problems I was having with SL and the 7300GT went away when I went to 10.4.8.

I still get crappy performance when I use 256MB of video RAM, but at least SL is playable at 128M and I don't have to run it inside OpenGL Profiler anymore...

-Z

I've got a Mac Pro, Dual 2.66, 1GB, with NVIDIA 7300, runnin OSX 10.4.7 and it works just fine. Very well, in fact.

My new 24" iMac with Nvidia 256 works fantistically well. I upgraded to 10.4.8 as soon as it arrived, using the combo downloaded from the site, not system update or the delta upgrade.
No problems at all. Not one crash after three days,andhours of play. Here's hoping.