How to Be a Happy Mac User in SL

You're right in saying "at least LL made a mac client".

I wish this were the case for more MMORPG's like Guildwars.

Oh well

-Data Bean-

I disagree with the orginal point of this thread... i would much rather play SL on my Big Mac than my IBM compatible and Windoze XP. Bottom line, the quality and performance of SL is totally dependent upon the resources you can provide.

I run a dual 2.0 G5 with 2.5GB RAM, ATI 9800 Pro Edition card (256 MB VRAM) and a 4MBit/sec cable connection. And with the 23" Apple Cinema Display, my SL experience is great, including several of the graphics performance options on.

Also have a nice IBM compatible, 3.5Ghz Pentium 4 running XP Pro, with 1GB Ram and 128MB VRAM InVidia G5200 card...on the same 4Mbit/sec cable connection. It runs SL just fine, but not with the richness and performance of the the Mac. And forget about turning on any enhanced graphics options.

Again... it is all about the computing and connectivity resource you can afford to provide. When is comes to SL - more, more and more is better.

E.

'nuff said... and agreed; i'd much rather be getting my art done on a mac, than having to chaperon windows through life...

Well, ok. I agree that (of course) I'd much rather use a Mac for EVERYTHING that have to resort to Windoze. Still, the few times when I get absolutely NO lag and the camera movement is smooth, it's an absolute joy. I want to have that MORE OFTEN!

So far, dropping the draw distance as low as 80 in high lag areas really helps, along with dropping tree and avatar detail. I just wish I could have it all, ya know?

in 5-7 years we'll have 1gig vram cards baseline with 10ghz g8's. in our heads.

The original point of this thread was to try to set realistic expectations and provide constructive assistance to Mac users who are struggling with performance problems. And yes, I've played SL on a tricked-out Windows PC. I prefer playing it on my lowly PowerBook, even though I may envy my Windows counterparts who are able to play with draw distance to 1024 m on their sub-$1000 PCs.



I couldn't agree more. Interestingly, your PC was probably a great deal less expensive than your Mac, and your $400 BTO graphics option absolutely smokes the the low-end card in your PC. It would be fun, and enlightening, to compare the two again after putting the same graphics card in the PC.

I have a 12" 1.5 ghz PowerBook that did have 768mb RAM. SL worked, but not satisfactorily. I popped in a 1 GB RAM chip (bringing the system to the max 1.25 GB RAM) and it works much, much better now, almost comparable to the 3.2 GHz/1GB RAM HP Windows laptop I'd borrowed. Whether using ethernet or (802.11g) WiFi doesn't seem to make any noticable difference in my experience.

-- Kat Lemieux

My PowerMac Dual G5 2GHz with a GeForce FX 5200 is smoked by my single-Athlon 2GHz with a GeForce FX 5200. With Second Life on default settings, the PowerMac 5200 delivers 9-11 FPS and the Athlon 5200 delivers 20-24 FPS.

YMMV.

um, exactly which PC are you all talking about here ?

I'm talking my PC. What PC are you asking about here?

Now that iMacs with Intel are shipping, I wonder if the gap will narrow.

!

I'd not seen this post before for some reason.

I used to be in SL on a 1GHz G4 with 512MB and a 64MB video card. It ran really quite slowly - 2-3 fps was my norm with pretty minimal settings.

I've now got a 2.7GHz DP G5 with a big nvidia card and 2GB. My performance with everything except local lighting turned on a huge draw range is in the 15-20fps region just about anywhere, and about 10-15 in the welcome area. In really quiet areas I get over 50fps. Local lighting gives me a 30%+ hit in perforance. I did a cold install recently after some problems and the default settings gave me about 35fps - increasing the draw range made more difference than anything else did.

My partner usually uses a pretty tricked up PC and gets very similar performance everywhere, with very similar settings. Local lighting affects her performance to a similar degree so she has it off too.

In my experience a minimal mac will run pretty slowly and from hearsay the minimum spec PC will run faster - the minimal mac will also run stably whilst the minimal PC crashes regularly.

A tricked out version of either runs quickly and well (macs still usually crash less often).

Again hearsay evidence, in order of importance your main RAM, you clockspeed, your vRAM size are the important hardware choices. My in world testing and playing - anisotrophic filters makes negligable speed difference (and may occasionally speed things up as you draw less triangles), local lighting has a huge impact, clothing layers I don't see a speed difference (didn't on the slow mac either) and turning off far clip and on the reduce draw distance if your fps falls below X can make a big difference when you arrive somewhere laggy.

There are other issues too - my mac *tends* to be better at rezzing people's clothing than my partner's PC - it's not a platform based issue, its a SL issue if you change too often or too far and the asset server 'forgets' to bake the texture properly.

Comparing like with like between PCs and Macs is always tricky - but saying it runs slower just isn't true in my experience. I *have* heard of someone on a PC getting 50+fps regularly. Someone who managed to get on and look at his preferences found that although he had a tricked up machine he also had everything turned down to minimum - a situation most mac users won't tolerate.

Shiny is ugly as sin. I turn it off just because EVERYONE overuses it. I can't even stand to look at a couple of my own avs with shiny on, and I dearly wish the prims in question (feathers) weren't no-mod.

If I could turn shiny down so that "high" came out about where low shiny is now, that'd be different.

Definitely turn off local lighting. Local lighting costs me about half my FPS even when I can't find any Light objects in sight. One area went from 14 FPS down to 0.5 FPS when I tried it with local lighting on.

SL client has a gift for causing my system to kernel panic (X.4). Bah. I give up. I'll just go play Wolfenstein ET. SL -> Trash Bin.

Let me know when they manage to fix the problems. Maybe I'll come back then.

I just want to report that SL works fantastic for me, never had a kernel panic. It does crash from time to time in one very specific way - editing shiny hemispheres too quickly. I've reported it to LL but no real result on that. I just don't turn shiny on now until i'm done building, haven't had a crash since. It was heck trying to figure out why I was crashing though, took a couple of days of almost constant crashing to figure that oune out.

Wolfenstein is so not SL. lol.

Try trashing your kext cache files instead Chris.

I'm probably the last Mac user to realize this, but Virex is incompatible with Tiger and should be removed. The only reason I noticed this was that in activity monitor it was apparent that Vshield was sometimes hogging CPU time. Now that Virex is gone, I *feel* that SL is a little faster...may be a placebo effect of course. Any views?

Virex should just be removed anyway, as well as any other anti-virus software. I would not be at all surprised if it was slowing things down.

Is there anyway of benchmarking different Mac setups for sl? There's a stack of anecdotal stuff in this forum, but maybe someone at LL has a benchmark we could use to compare systems more objectively.
And yes, I know that there are so many processor/graphics card/Ram combinations possible that it's not gonna be perfect, but it'd be a lot better than what we have so far.

Yes. Anti-virus software on a Mac is never going to be worth running, even if it was free. AV software inherently reduces the stability and reliability of your computer, and is only worth using if there is more benefit to using it than to not using it.

There is no benefit to using AV software on a Mac, or a Palm, or a Pocket PC. None. Nada. Zilch. Zip. Zero. Until there's real virus activity in the wild (not "demos", not "dangerous software", not "backdoors", but actual propogating viruses that there's a risk of being infected by), AV software is worse than useless. Always.

The biggest factor to that will be the compiler they use for the Intel Macs vs the PC one. Intel has a version of thier C++ Compiler out for the Intel Based Macs now, if they go with that one the performance should be on par. I have had the pleasure of using the Intel compiler for windows, and the differnce between it and sya the Microsoft Compiler is night and day. I used to have to write specific loops in Assembly to get the speed I needed with the Microsoft compiler, when we switched to the Intel one it compiled faster code then I could hand write in thoes loops.

I understand that Blizzard has gone with the Intel Compiler for the Intel Mac version of WoW, and it is suposed to be on par performance wise between an Intel PC and Intel Mac with the same hardware now.

Would SL work with the OSX server suite

YOU COULD RUN IT ON 1000+ XSERVES

exlporgasms

Looking for any more input on getting SL to run smoothly - I have been experiencing one crash after another on a 12" 1.5Ghz powerbook with 1.25 G of RAM. Runs smmothly for a few minutes then either locks up completely (pinwheel of death) or I can only spin left or right and can't do any other movement. I have tried cranking down the video settings but the powerbook still gets screamin hot - so I am asusming its probably a heat issue. Any comments. (time to get myself some liquid nitrogen )

It might be your powerbook can't cope: SL in the freezer anyone?

However, those sorts of things can happen with a corrupted cache (choose clear cache and restart), and sometimes if you've run the patch installer rather than a fresh install. It's worth trying both of those first.

Thanks Eloise,

Clearing the cache helped somewhat. I think the heat is the key issue though - I tried a little experiment An ice cold gel pack underneath the Powerbook worked great for a while - I may seriously have to try to build or buy something. Looks like there a few good laptop coolers out there and a least one person has wired up 2 12V PC fans on a stand and says it works good.