How many fps do you experience on a Macintosh?

I'm barely over 10 fps, 5 fps most of the time, up to 20 in a empty sim (cool but rapidly boring). Packet losses are consistently >0.1 per thousands, sometimes as hig than 0.5. I suspect a network problem. Are you much faster? Is the Macintosh version known to be slower than the PC version?

iMac G5 1.8GHz PowerPC, Mac OS X 10.4.7

2 88.161.20.254 (88.161.20.254) 27.113 ms 9.039 ms 8.673 ms
3 213.228.20.254 (213.228.20.254) 13.385 ms * 8.032 ms
4 lyon-6k-1-v804.intf.routers.proxad.net (212.27.50.102) 12.883 ms * *
5 * * *
6 tenge-2-4.car1.paris1.level3.net (212.73.207.13) 31.349 ms 62.973 ms *
7 ae-0-53.mp1.paris1.level3.net (4.68.109.65) 46.832 ms ae-0-51.mp1.paris1.level3.net (4.68.109.1) 19.993 ms 28.372 ms
8 so-3-0-0.mp1.sanfrancisco1.level3.net (209.247.8.89) 175.030 ms as-0-0.mp2.sanfrancisco1.level3.net (64.159.0.217) 213.615 ms 175.040 ms
9 ge-6-0-0.gar1.sanfrancisco1.level3.net (4.68.124.206) 173.860 ms ge-7-0-0.gar1.sanfrancisco1.level3.net (4.68.124.210) 174.464 ms ge-6-0-0.gar1.sanfrancisco1.level3.net (4.68.124.206) 174.451 ms
10 internap-ne.gar1.sanfrancisco1.level3.net (4.71.44.6) 231.595 ms 175.228 ms 175.275 ms
11 border1.ge1-1-bbnet1.sfo002.pnap.net (63.251.63.1) 179.431 ms 175.415 ms 177.406 ms

How much RAM does your iMac have? I upgraded from 512MB to 2GB and that helped tremendously.

I average 17-20 fps on a 2Ghz MacBook Pro. In a populated area (15 or so av's nearby, it drops to 6-12fps. Empty sim, 40-50fps.

I keep my draw distance to 72 and bumpmapping/shiny turned off.

1GB. I dont' know the amount of RAM SL requires, but closing other apps to release memory doesn't make difference. Draw distance is 96m, bump and shiny on since they add tremendeous realism. On the GeForce FX5200 with 64MB video RAM, it makes no great difference to turn them off, I think.

Urgh, 64MB of vRAM is not nice for SL. 1GB of RAM is pretty borderline too IME. I'd suggest that your graphics card is probably the limiting factor, but more memory might well help.

We did some testing a while ago, and SL seems to like about 1200MB of real RAM, and as much vRAM as you can get.

I've not seen numbers for a similar PC to those specs. Really tweaked PCs run faster than the fastest Mac I've seen, but unless you're shooting macs run more smoothly on lower fps than PCs according to just about everyone that I've seen that's tried them both. My personal experience, in an area I knew well, I typically get about 12-15fps on my mac, but I can walk, talk, fly precisely etc. with no bother. A non-tweaked PC I tried it on got about 25fps in the same region, but was a nightmare to actually use. Not because of higher fps and overshooting, it felt chunky and clunky is the best way to describe it.

Personally, and it is just a personal feeling the FPS is not the critical feature in SL. If they get really low (<5 for long periods) then that can be irritating. Time dilation and "moving through treacle" are far more worrying on a mac, I'm usually aware, at least if walking, of sim FPS dropping below 43, which is a TD of 0.95. You can get that in a sim at any client FPS. The sim FPS are not client dependent obviously, that's internal issues at the LL end.

If you're getting consistent packet loss, try a route trace and find out where. I use What Route, which was free and I assume still is. You might well find it's at the LL end, although depending on your home location, quite a few europeans find getting into the SF area is bad (some SF based big companies are hosted elsewhere and get much better figures route tracing figures than those that are in SF for me and a number of other europeans that I've spoken about it with, so it's not LL's fault).

Mac mini. w/ Intel CPU. and 2 Gigs of RAM.
DSL of 1.5 Megabits. (actually runs @1.25Mega)

I get 5 FPS. Okay for moving, texting, building.
NOT good for dancing or shooting or beautiful texture viewing.
(the mini has very poor graphics)

Nevertheless, I still dance, shoot and view gorgeous SL scenery !
But my next Mac will have a real graphics card.!

OBTW, I sometimes borrow a PC laptop. Old. Klunky. Underpowered. The graphics are smoother than my mini, but, as pointed out, it feels 'Klunky.'

My iMac G5 is upgradable up to 2GB RAM. Unfortunately I don't think the vRAM is ugradable too (I will check that). So, I may have to stick to 64MB vRAM or buy a new computer

Packet losses are horrible (6.0%% today). I'm in Europe and have losses entering Level3 Paris and Internap San Francisco. This may mean as well that ICMP is disabled. I never can traceroute up to sim400.agni.lindenlab.com.

"Jumping textures" (we spoke about in-world, as far as I remind) are reappearing, and progressive slow-down of the client is still hurting me. Strangely, the last week was free from these annoyances and a pleasure to play. SL lacks stability. I really ask myself if it is a good move to go Premium.

Gets 2 to 10, usually.

i get from 4-15fps on my quicksilver G4 800MHz with 1152MB of ram and a radeon 9800 pro w/ 128MB of vram. and i can tell you the 9800 is a lot faster then the 8500 w/ 64MB i had befor.

Dear tech-savy friends,

Could one of you be so niiice to explain to this oh-so-un-techy-but-still-mac-loving girl what fps stands for?

Thanks sooo very much!
C

Frames per Second

a general performance guide to any FPS (First Person Shooter) or 3D realm. AS pointed out it is a way to measure how smooth things look in world, but the Macs do seem to be better at handling lower frame counts.

As an aside, I'm running a 1.83Ghz Mac Boo Pro with 2GB of RAM, and it is 15-25FPS in sims that are not heavily lagged an populated. 6-10FPS in bad areas, and feel decent at that rate.

I have a G5 PowerMac Duel 2Ghz with 8gigs of memory.
My Video is the ATI x850 256mb card.

Lately I have been getting from 5 - 10 frames per second.
But about 2 weeks ago I was easily getting 30+

I not sure what happened but all of a sudden it seems like I switched back to my old crappy laptop.

The game went from running fine to yuck...

I get 15 to 25 fps on my comp (see signature), I'm gonna get some more RAM next I think, though I'm not sure if it'll make any difference to SL it'll be nice for other things.

Thank you Alfrik!

I usually get 20 fps, sometimes 15. Up in my skybox I shoot up to 60 fps sometimes even 70 or 80.

MacBook Pro Core Duo 2.16 GHz 2 GB ATI Radeo X1600 256 MB vram

When I'm in the sim I roleplay in, I get generally about 5 FPS, if I'm lucky.

Imac 1.8GHZ, 10.4.8
512 MB DDR SDRAM

It is such a hinderance to me, because the sim is based around fighting, and those with PCS do way better than me.

I used to seldom have this problem in earlier versions. It seems that every version gets worse and worse. When I first started SL a year ago, I had a much better experience.

Now, I can barely participate in fighting because it lags everytime I shift my position.
It's ridiculous!

Not to mention long load times whenever I teleport to a new sim. textures take forever, and non-loading avatars don't show up with a mere group change anymore.

My experience is unacceptable most of the time.

When are they going to change this? Is it safe to conclude that Macs just aren't sufficient for gaming?

Macs are easily as good for gaming as PCs, it's the developer's fault that their code doesn't get written properly for Macs as well which is unfortunate.

However, there's an upcoming feature (see the 'first look' or 'feature viewer' forums about it) that does give some nice increases in FPS. Nothing huge but it's progress at least.
Also now that the client is open-source, Mac developers can get stuck in and start improving Mac performance by using Mac specific code and APIs to boost things. Also of note is that LL said they're developing a multi-core version of the client as well, and Mac OS X is pretty darn good at multi-threading so it ought to really help things out.

I don't think the future of SL on Mac is as grim as it used to be

On my Mac Pro 3.0Ghz dual core Zeons, 2 gigs ram and the X1900 Video card I am getting 50-75 fps on a quiet sim on a busy sim I get between 25-35 in Ahern I was getting 34fps
I should mention that this is while running XP and the SL windows version under bootcamp
Running the Mac SL client under the Mac OS has a decrease in FPS to around 30-38 in the quiet sim and 15 - 19 in a busy sim such as Ahearn

Next version of Mac OS X should help. The graphics currently does NOT use the dual cores...but this is supposed to be fixed in Leopard--due out this spring.

My roommate's mid-range Macbook with the Intel GMA950, 2GHz Core 2 Duo, and 2GB of RAM gets anywhere from 3.5-10 FPS in prim-heavy environments with draw distance at 64, graphics sliders at 50%, bumpmapping/shiny turned on, and trees turned off (hit ctrl-opt-shift-3 to toggle).

Environment is a big factor, it seems, as is camera focus. The Edge, with 70-some avatars in-sim had a framerate similar to your typical furry sim with 30 avatars in-sim (all those little prims...), but I've never seen FPS drop below 3.5 (yet).

Also, the thing runs HOT. Even with third-party fan control software running, CPU core temps run about 75C. Get one of those cooling pads with the integrated fan to keep air moving under the thing.

As always, your mileage may vary,

H.

I'm running SL on my 2.16GHz MacBook Pro with 2 Gigs of Ram and 256 MB ATI video card. In a nearly empty aerea I can get up to 40 fps. Average I'd say 25-30. In a crowded aerea I get 10-20, average 15 fps. Sometimes it drops down to 5, but within seconds it's up to 10-15 again...Hope this get's better...