SL on Macbook Pro

I was planning on replacing my Powerbook G4 with a new Macbook Pro equipped with 2.0 GHZ, a 256 MB Video Card, and 2 GB RAM. Will I see a noticeable improvement in performance over my G4 with this new system, and if I add a 7200 RPM hard drive will there be significant improvement over the same Macbook Pro equipped with the standard 5400 RPM drive?

Yes and Yes

Expect to see 40-60 fps ( or higher sometimes ) in lag free areas and much better performance everywhere else, even with viewing distance set to 256m and all options on and set to full detail. This is based on a week of my own experience with the same spec machine. It seems the new client is rather MBPro friendly !

Just wanted to second what has already been said. I replaced my PBG4 with an iMac, which is essentially equal or worse than the MacBook Pro in every way hardware-wise, and I have jumped from ~3fps to ~20fps. I don't seem to be getting the 40-60fps other people are claiming, but it may be because I only have 128 megs of video ram, 5400 rpm drive, and I have a second monitor which is probably eating up video ram.

You should be aware, however, that it is still fairly slow if you are in an area where many avatars are present. This appears to be true on any machine though.

How's the heat and fan noise on the Macbook Pro with running SL for a while?

My TiBook will run SL (not well, but it will work), but after just a few seconds, the fans kick into high speed whine mode, which is usually enough to convince me that whatever I'm doing, I don't want to be doing it badly enough to put up with that noise.

Even my iMac G5 runs SL with the fans turned much higher than normal, but it's not nearly so bad.

I have it! Its great, great,.,, and Mr Svarog has already mentioned AL other plus things..but he forgot the minus.. ))

MONEY!! LOTS OF! YOU NEED THAT!!!

)

/Tina

Mine certainly gets very warm, although the fan always stays quiet

I get 20-30 fps, up to maybe 40 in good areas, but I've still had places where it goes down below 1FPS. Never seen 600.

Are you on a 15" or 17"?

Also, for some reason I can't use Avatar Vertex Program.

nor have I!

But seriously I've seen peaks of above 70 up in my 400 prim skypad which is about the least laggy place I know. On my G4 PB I'd see a maximum of 25 up there.

Normal operation when travelling around SL seems to between 15 to 35, but this is as I said with 256m draw distance and all detail sliders up full. So all in all not too bad at all compared with my G4 Powerbook, which would normally give me between 4 to 10fps at most with a draw distance of 64.

All in all, the PBPro gives me up to 3x the frame rate and 4x the draw distance of my G4 powerbook in equivalent locations.



15"




Nor I, Looks like it's disabled, I just assumed the card doesn't support the feature or some part of the implementation, I haven't checked though.

I upgraded from my TiPB two months ago. Never looked back. SL runs very smooth on my MacBook Pro. The heat issue is something I have gotten used to, it runs hot, it gets the most hot running SL, I even have a fan under it. But all in all the heat is not so bad u have to quit.

I get about 20-30ffps. Yeah, it was a lot of money but well worth it. I went back on the old TiPB for something the other day, wow, talk about SLOW.

Scarlet

We tried (and tried, and tried) to get Avatar Vertex Program working with the new shaders and it resulted in a ~1 FPS framerate .

A few of us Lindens figured you wouldn't like that.

It turns out to be a problem with Apple's implementation of the video drivers. We have contacted Apple about the issue and hope it will be resolved in some future Mac OS X update (or 10.5 ). Until then, no AVP love for those who wear the Apple with pride.