question about the macbook pro

has anyone figured out whether or not sl will run well on the fully endowed mac book pro? I'm considering buying one but cannot justify the purchase unless i know the answer to this question.

Hi there. I use a macbook pro, about a year old. It works reasonably well, though I don't have much to compare it to. When I am at work connected to the ethernet it flies. At home I have a 1.3mb dsl connection at it performs fair. The latest release of the Mac Client is very rich in features I love it, but it freezes more than the previous version. Overall, I would say my experience is good with the MacBook Pro. Oh, it does get roasting hot! I have only a 128mb graphics card.

Anna

thanks for your input, but could you clarify for me whether you have the new macbook pro that came out a few months ago or the older version?

It runs beautifully. I'm running SL in another window right now on my MacBook Pro 2.8GHz using the nVidia 9600M GT graphics (with 512MB texture memory). All the graphics settings are on high, with 4096 particles and a draw distance of 184m. Normally I run the draw distance on this machine a little higher, but at the moment I'm in an "excessively primmed" area...

Good luck with your new machine!

thats fantastic! thanks so much for the good review Trilobyte, i'm going to order today.

TriloByte, thanks. But I have a further question about the GPU use on the new MBP. I tried the new MBP (2.53GHz) at the Apple store, after downloading the latest viewer onto their demo machine. When I first opened SL, the viewer gave an error message about not recognizing the graphics card and that it was reverting to lower default settings. So I logged out, went into Energy Saver and toggled the higher-end 9600M GT card. Then SL ran beautifully, with no initial error message.

I tried variations of shutting down and logging in and out, and frequently got the error message. So it was unclear to me whether SL was actually using the settings of the higher end graphics card, or even the lower-end 9400. The error message seemed to indicate that SL had reverted to its standard default graphics card settings.

The MBP did perform beautifully, varying between 15-30 fps on maxed-out graphics settings which I varied between high and ultra. Are these the statistics you find?

So my questions are:
(1) Do you get this error message when running SL on your MBP?
(2) Do you think SL recognizes either of the GPUs on the new MBP?
(3) Someone in an earlier post suggested "turning off" the "detect hardware" option in the client. Can you tell me how to do this, or whether it's a possibility?

First thing I should point out is never use a retail store's display computer as a benchmark for any third party application. The conditions will never be "real world" and the machines are often either disabled or impaired in some way. In the case of the Apple Store machines, they're running Apple's own internal concierge software, plus I imagine additional behind the scenes stuff. All of that would negatively affect the performance, compatibility, and stability of whatever you tried loading and running.

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That said, no I have not seen that error message on my computer. It's worth pointing out that long before I loaded up SL, I went into System Preferences and specified that I wanted Performance settings.

Second life gave me no indication that it had any problem recognizing my computer's GPU. If it was having a problem, there's likely no way it would be able to deliver the ridiculously amazing performance that it's been giving me.

No idea offhand how to tell you to disable the detect hardware thing. It had no problems on my machine, so I have no need to disable it.

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One last bit to add. My girl's brand new MacBook just arrived today. After using Migration Assistant to move all the stuff from her old machine to the new one, she's running SL right now without any problems whatsoever.

Her old machine was a MacBook Pro 2.4GHz (late 2007 Santa Rosa machine with the nVidia 8600 graphics). She experienced freezes, crashes, and glitches GALORE on that machine. Since she no longer needs to use that work machine, she opted to get a new MacBook (screen size wasn't a big factor, and the MacBook's smaller size/weight was a big draw for her).

When she started up SL this afternoon, she got that error message that said her video card was newer than what Second Life knew of. She clicked through the error message and went about her virtual day. Not a single problem. After half an hour, I checked out her system and found that she had not yet tweaked her settings for the new hardware. So we turned a few settings up higher, increased the amount of texture memory, and generally told SL to do more stuff. Her new MacBook runs SL extremely well, far better than her old MacBook Pro.

I'm extremely impressed with the new MacBook and MacBook Pro. The nVidia 9400M and 9600M GT are proving to be really solid performers (in SL and other applications), both systems run cooler than older machines, and they have so far met every challenge we've thrown at them. Hope that info helps!

You're a jewel to take the time for such a helpful reply! If you could take the time to clarify just a couple things about what you said, I'd be most appreciative. You say you loaded the performance settings before loading SL. But have you tried running SL on the basic-level 9400 gpu, without toggling the higher performance gpu? And if so, how was SL?

Could you tell me your fps numbers (on the MBP and your girlfriend's MB, if you know them) so I could compare it to what I got, which was 15-30 fps with maxed-out graphic settings, varied high to ultra.

Just had a EUREKA moment: If your girlfriend's MacBook gave an error recognizing the graphics card, it must be the 9400 gpu that is unknown to SL, since that's all the MB has (no 9600). The 9600 may also be unknown to SL; we don't really know for sure if SL is using either card's higher settings. All we know is that the machine is set on one card or the other. We don't know that SL is recognizing it.
And we know that both machines run SL beautifully. But here's what I'm thinking: The error message indicates SL is using lower default SL settings. And if SL runs well on the lower default settings, think how well it would run if we could figure out (1) whether SL is detecting either of the MBP graphics card settings, and (2) if not, how can we get SL to recognize the card's settings. (It may just happen in a future viewer update.)
I'll be very interested to hear what happens when you run the MBP on the 9400 card. Do you get the error message?

The video card error you see will show up when the Macbookpro is using the power save mode which uses the lower end video GPU, if you go into power settings and switch it to performance the higher end video card kicks and you wont see that error anymore.

Thanks TriloByte and Ninja, for your very helpful replies. I did quite a bit of research the past couple days myself and would like to offer it here, in case anybody else is wondering about this. It turns out that the error message only means that Second Life has not fully tested the new Mac Book Pro graphics cards (NVIDIA 9400M and 9600M GT) and so they are not included on the graphic cards list in SL System Requirements. I received this info direct from Linden after submitting a support ticket. LL said the new cards might run SL fine, but LL could not guarantee it, nor could they say when or if the cards would be tested and added to the SL list in System Requirements. Because these cards are not yet on that list, the program opens with lower graphics settings, but you can easily adjust these upwards once you log into SL.
Btw, SL seems to run pretty well for me on the 2.58 Ghz late-08 MBP. Generally 30 fps in uncrowded areas with High or Ultra graphics, down to 10 fps with mid-range graphics settings in areas jammed with avatars, and even lower sometimes if you're dancing and there's lots of other avatars dancing too. But I could always get good performance by adjusting graphics settings. No freezes or crashes. More in my blog at http://tinyurl.com/6y2xx2

nice to hear that your mac Pro running well , I have a new one , lowest possible grafhics and still I crashe all the time , or am frozen alwayes when it is over 60 000 ppl online .
Today i tryed to uppload an image , and didnt success , crashing every time . Neverhappend on PC,
So??? Any good advices ppl?
thank you

Ninja - in reply to your questions... I have not run SL with the 9400M on my MacBook Pro, just the 9600M GT. Frame rates can vary wildly depending on where I am or what's being loaded, in a 5 minute walk through New Babbage this morning they dipped as low as 15fps and frequently ran as high as 44fps.

I have seen/used the 9400M on the girl's new MacBook. While the game comes up with the error message, it still runs beautifully. While I don't know the fps numbers on her machine the animation is still extremely fluid and smooth, easily better than the performance of the Santa Rosa MacBook Pro (with nVidia 8600 series chip) that she had been using previously.

The main thing I've noticed between the MacBook with the 9400M and the MacBook Pro with the 9600M GT is texture loading times. The 9400M is no slouch, but it takes considerably longer to load textures in 'dense' areas of SL (shops in double prim land, for example). As with any machine, reducing your draw distance will improve the time it takes to load textures.

I have no intention of 'dumbing down' my MacBook Pro to run in 9400M mode anytime soon. I like having a discrete GPU with 32 cores and 512MB of dedicated memory at my disposal. And chances are, if you had an MBP you'd probably use the 9600M GT as well.

Neither my girl nor I really care what SL is defaulting to for video settings (since it doesn't recognize the 9400M chip), it just works. And works really, really well. She's really happy with the performance, and I expect that future versions of the SL viewer will only get better (as Linden Labs adds support for that specific nVidia chip).

Rosele... do you mean Mac Pro, or MacBook Pro? This is a thread for the MacBook Pro, but you mentioned Mac Pro in your post.

If you're using a late 2008 MacBook Pro, my suggestion would be to check your graphics settings. CMD-P to open preferences and then click on the Graphics tab. From there, click the Hardware Options button. On that screen, you should see a slider for Texture memory. Make sure yours is set to no higher than 128MB. The 2.4GHz MacBook Pro has 256MB of dedicated memory on-board, but that's for everything your computer is running. As a rule, you should only let SL use no more than half of what you have available. Less if you have multiple graphics-intensive applications running at the same time.

Hopefully that works out for you... good luck!

thank you my friend
I have latest Mac Bok Pro
I have everything on minimum , nothing running at the same time , but it is clear that everything running great only when users amoint online is under 50 000, over 60 000 is imposibble to build r do anything
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