Second Life (1.18.02) + MBP 2.2GHz = GOOD GOD

I unwrapped my shiny new MBP last night. 2.2Ghz Core Duo 2 model, 2G of RAM, Nvidia 8600 128MB chipset, OSX 10.4. Straight out of the box, no changes other than to hop onto SL.com and download the viewer.

After staring bewilderedly at my jerkily rendered avatar for a few minutes, it crashes. Hard. The entire MBP locks up!

I'm getting 4FPS! I get better performance on my old PC, which has a Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB, 1.6GHz dual AthlonMPs and 1G of slower 333Mhz RAM!

I reboot the Mac, go back into SL, and after a few minutes, it crashes, once agan taking my entire laptop with it!

What the hell is up with Second Life on OSX?

Well, I guess this answers my question: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1757

Well, something has been severely f*d up with Second Life and the new MacBook Pros running OS X ever since June 5 when they came out. I have the 2.4 GHz model with 256MB VRAM and it's just the same, crashes all the damn time.

Of course, if I run the client in Vista then it works fine, but then I don't have access to all my text files or the programs I use for scripting etc. I've basically quit Second Life until they fix this crap.

I hope we don't have to wait until Leopard comes out in October. I do think that Leopard will greatly improve OpenGL performance (they say it doubles WoW's framerates, so I suspect it will help SL too). But I'm so very tempted to install the Leopard beta, since this is basically unusable!

And to think, I bought this laptop just to run SL. Ugh.

-=GE=-

Thankfully, I had more in store for my MBP when I bought it than Second Life, but I admit SL was going to be the icing on the cake.

Just to prove to myself that this hardware could easily handle SL, I installed Windpws XP Pro using Bootcamp and then tried out Second Life -- 30-40 FPS constant, even in a busy, complicated area. Now that's more what I expect.

Me too, I want Leopard also, but I think this is more along with the OSX port than anything else. Something has changed in the latest MBP to have triggered it.

Bah. Well, SL for me will be limited to when I can get to my WinXP desktop for now...

I hope that you're right that Leopard will improve gaming performance on the Mac. My new MBP 2.2GHz (Santa Rosa chipset) hovers between 1-3 fps while running SL (including jerky movement and frequent crashes). My old MBP 2.16 GHz at least didn't crash while maintaining a feable 5-8 fps. It pains me that I have to load Boot Camp (and Windows) just to get SL running at a decent level.

This is all really disturbing.

It seems to be a direct interaction between Second Life and the OS X nvidia drivers specifically. The reason?

- The new MBP runs Quake 4 (which is much more demanding on the GPU than SL) just fine.
- SL runs just fine on the new MBP under Windows.
- SL runs just fine on Macs with ATI chipsets, and even older Nvidia chipsets (the 7300/7600 series) on Mac OS X.

Therefore, we know that this problem is caused by the specific way that SL uses OpenGL, which is probably triggering bugs in the Nvidia driver code. Bugs that were not found in normal testing because other 3D applications don't seem to bring them to light.

Hopefully this will be fixed...Somehow.

This problem is well known by now. LL is working it with Apple.

I just wonder what is taking them so long. It's been over two and a half months since this hardware was out. I have a lot of work to do in SL and this is really hurting me.. I don't want to run my computer and have it requiring hard reboots, since that can seriously mess up your machine. And Lindens have not given any reports on the status of this.

-=GE=-

I have a Macbook Pro (new toy) it's a refurbished one, though. not the very latest version.

2.3ghz, 2gb ram, ATI x1600 256mb and OS X 10.4.10(i think)

I did have one SL crash, but since then it's been fine. I don't know what to suggest though. Maybe I shouldn't say anything. I said that my Vista laptop was ok, and then it started crashing SL all the time

I was considering getting a regular MAC Book (not a pro). Does anyone know if it is even capable of running SL? TIA.

I am running a white MAC book. with 1 gig memory, runs SL ok, not the fastest, due to integrated graphics, does not crash often, BUT the integrated graphics set IS NOT supported by SL so with some new viewer upgrade it may stop working forever!

I have had the same frustrating experience. All I can say is something between Apple, nVidia, and SL is royally f*cked up.

Old MacBook Pro with ATI graphics card worked fine.

New MackBook Pro with nVidia graphics card - sucks big time. Crash, crash, crash (the whole system, not just SL). [MBP 15" 2.4 Core 2 Duo. 4gb ram, nvidia 8600 256mg graphics]

Runs everything besides SL great.

Runs SL great under Windows / Boot Camp - stable and much faster. The Boot Camp drivers don't support external monitor resolutions beyond 1024x768, so I can't take advantage of my 23" display panel. Also, all my software is for OS X so multitasking while using SL is out.