Snow Leopard

Good luck waiting for Digidesign! They took OVER SIX MONTHS to update for 10.5 ......!!! They are the slowest pieces of crap and I switched to MOTU because they are always ready for system updates the day it comes out, unlike Digidesign, which IS THE WORST SOFTWARE COMPANY I HAVE EVER DONE BUSINESS WITH AND I'M NEVER GOING BACK TO THOSE GREEDY, SLOW, BUGGY PROGRAMS!!

As for Secondlife, the anti-aliasing doesn't work. It also took Lindenlabs and Apple until, like, 10.5.6 or 7 to FINALLY get SL running smooth and fast on my MacBook Pro from 2007. IT TOOK THEM THAT LONG. And if you turn off the anti-aliasing on my machine then it goes SLOWER. So whatever makes it faster also needs the anti-aliasing and it ain't working on this MBP. I am testing it on the new 17" MBP at the apple store and same story.

My advice: wait two years and THEN buy one, guys. By then the drivers will have caught up with the software, or vice versa, or whatever.

Just upgraded to Snow Leopard. Yeh the Anti aliasing is gone, and SL runs slower than before. Your ok if you do not move around a lot but seeing as i do a lot of Machinema this is gonna be a serious BORK. Will hope LL can do some tweeks, but i'm more confident in the Third Party Patchers to figure this one out.

Actually, I've had some of the most dramatic crashes since I installed Snow Leopard this weekend. If I option-click and cam around a lot, I'll get garbage onscreen and crash within about 5 minutes. This is on a late 2008 MBP.

OK so 07 MBP w nvidia 8600 + machinima already challenging enough + soundflower probs + some macs crashing = wait on Snow Lep

There's an easy work around to the soundflower issues. I haven't had any problems with soundflower since.

http://radarmasukami.com/2009/08/the-sound-of-flower-in-snow-leopard/

But yeah, antialiasing is broken on my macbook pro, but it seems to be working on my mac pro. Weird. The Mac Pro has a radeon hd 4870, the macbook pro is the nvidia 8600M GT.

I have been running SL on Snow Leopard for a couple of days on my Macbook Pro 15" (late 2008 model). I'd say it runs worse than before.

Frame rates a little lower than before the upgrade. Anti-aliasing not working unless renderGlow turned off.

The biggest problem however is that my computer keeps having short freezes. A couple of seconds of unresponsiveness only when running SL. The mouse cursor moves, but can't do ANYTHING else on my computer, not only in SL. Also in SL itself I get more unresponsiveness and avatar seems to get stuck in it's place more.

Anyone else having similar problems?

That's what's happening to me since I upgraded to Snow Leopard. If I'm in a high lag area, it starts stuttering and freezing for short durations. After a short while, it will crash or the screen will start to display garbage. This is a 2008 MBP with the Nvidia 9600. I'm not sure why some people are experiencing SL running better under Slow Leopard, but I've had enough problems since I've upgraded that I'm considering using Time Machine to restore the old OS.

MBPro users with the 8600M ran into special problems thru most of 2008 - for months I had to run SL from Windows. That still leaves me wary of OS changes.
It's alarming to read that even power machinimists like Loki are having trouble. Snolep is great but the Apple store won't run out any time soon - maybe I can wait.

I don't actually crash, only freeze for short times. And I used to get garbage on the screen BEFORE the upgrade, but now that is gone. I thought it might be the graphics card over heating back then.

SL on SL has been running great for me... no AA, but besides that it does run fast.. unless you leave AA on, which you shouldn't since it doesn't work... if anything its the same speed or faster than leopard, definitely not slower....

I'm on a Macbook Pro late 2008 Unibody... have tried on both the 9400 and 9600

Actually, a lot of blogs are posting benchmarks that say that OpenGL is slower under Snow Leopard. Check out http://www.macnn.com/articles/09/08/29/benchmarks...snow.leopards/
Sounds like 10.6.1 might fix the graphics performance problem.

Yes, I was one of those. The problem was driver related, and SOME of the problems were due to defective chips that Nvidia sold Apple (and others). They finally admitted this year the scope of the problem.

Anyway, the current anti-aliasing bug seems to be nvidia related, my ATI Radeon HD 4870 in my Mac Pro seems to be anti-aliasing just fine, whereas the 8600M GT in my Macbook Pro is not.

Well, I also have seen the jerky panning issues BEFORE snow leopard. In my case they are solved by turning off VBO.

I don't think that's simply a snow leopard problem.

I will be running extensive test with multiple viewers ( Standard, Release Candidate, Snow Globe, Community Developer, First Look and Snow Globe Test Release) and will get back with you.



Running Early 2009 iMac 2.4Ghz, 4GB 800Mhz Ram, ATi Radeon HD2400


I know that all SL viewers will not recognize Apple Video cards properly. Mostly due to how Apple will clock the processors, so usually, it will only recognized 50% of the actual Video card Speed. So when I log inworld, I have to manually increase the Open GL setting in the Graphics setting to get any kind of performance.
I am stoked about the Open CL in Snow Leopard especially for those that have a tone of extra Memory available like me.

There has been a lot of discussion about the FSAA problems and jerkiness with Snow Leopard in the jira.

To get smooth operation back, you can turn off VBO, but your frame rate will drop, at least on Nvidia cards.

To get FSAA back, you have to use the Second Life debug console and turn off full screen glow. Not a huge loss to get FSAA back.

I've found that the situation improves if I go into the Hardware Options and slide the Texture Memory setting all the way to the right to 512MB. If I do this and don't pan around too much, I can go for a while without the viewer crashing. I do have to reset this setting every time I launch the viewer, though, probably because the viewer can't actually use all the available vram for textures, but the value it resets it to (256MB) is still higher than the original value (128MB). At least now I can limp along until 10.6.1 with the rumoured OpenGL fixes comes out.

Using a Late '08 MacBook Pro, with Snow Leopard, with graphics turned right up, no problems, get's a little warm however... but I keep it regulated with external cooling systems =]

SL cranked up the fan on my old Powerbook G4, on my current early 08 MBP, and clearly on later MBPS too. I mentally associate SL audio with a whirring fan . . . it's like my beloved MBP is crying "second liiife . . . noooooooo . . ."

Antialiasing is still broken in 10.6.1.

Snow Leopard is not making my life better.

I will note that I didn't have antialiasing functional on 10.5.x either, on either my early 2008 iMac or my early 2009 MacBook Pro.

For those experiencing performance issues, go into your system preferences -> security and make sure that "use secure virtual memory" is not enabled. I did not have this enabled under leopard but under snow leopard, it turned it on for two of my machines and not a third one. It made a noticeable difference on one of the laptops.