Plan in place for Intel based macs?

LOL!! Thanks for the update! I love footnotes!

id like to know.. if for some reason you dont have the Mactel version done by the time i have my new MacBook in Feburary (already ordered) if itll be playable enough under Rosetta.

My 3 year old.. exactly minimum specs powerbook.. really sucks running SL

I'll check to see if we can test it on the newest version of Rosetta. Since Second Life uses a lot of core technologies and industry standards on the Mac (Ogg Vorbis for audio, Open GL for video, standard communications protocols, etc) I don't *think* it should be a big deal, but don't quote me on that!

That shouldn't be a problem because SL shouldn't be directly accessing any graphics hardware... it's doing it all through OpenGL... which is mediated automatically by Mac OS X.

Not true. At the original announcement an Apple spoklesman stated that Apple would NOT be doing anything to prevent anyone running Windows on an intel Mac.

Sorry for the short notice, but Zero Linden and I will be demoing Second Life on the new ATI x1600 at Macworld today at 4-6 pm! The demo will be on a PPC quad so we're talking fast! Come meet a Linden in person at the Mezzanine ATI booth, Moscone Center!

Darn! Wish I was at Macworld to see your demo Brent! I hope you were able to make a couple of converts to SL!

Well, I found a 20" Intel iMac on demo at my local Apple Store. I downloaded and ran the regular PowerPC MacOS X build of SL 1.8.1 on it.

I'm very pleased to say it ran! I'm not so pleased to say it was pretty slow
It was playable (just) but frame rate was pretty low. (I didnt measure it though, this is just my subjective opinion). Also, textures too a VERY long time to load - it felt like almost a minute before most things had come in. Objects were taking maybe 20 seconds or so to rez as well.

I would estimate it was marginally slower than my Powerbook G4 (1.25GHz G4, 1Gb RAM, 64Mb Radeon 9600 mobility).

This is not conclusive testing, and I didnt do much playing around with the Preferences. The store was pretty busy with a load of people waiting to try out the Intel iMac (they only had one) so I didnt want to hog it too much. If I get a chance, I may try to go back to the store at another time and play around for longer.

On the plus side, SL aside, I was VERY impressed with the speed of the machine. All the Apple apps (Safari, iTunes, iPhoto etc) were VERY snappy! I only saw the spinning beachball once - while iPhoto was processing photos for the first time).

I think this machine ROCKS and I cant wait to see it with the Intel build of SL running!!

I haven't tried the current version of SL on the new Intel Macs, but I have an Intel Transition (developer) system, and SL does NOT run on its latest OSX software. However, the new Macs are running an even more recent version of OSX, so... In any case, a non-native version of SL will run quite slowly. LL has GOT to make Universal Binary versions available if they are going to continue to support the Mac. So hurry! Luckily, it's not that hard to do, though SL is surely a bit more of a challenge than the usual app.

In the future, I hope SL will take advantage of Mac's threading. It could go hugely faster than it does now on a multi CPU Mac, and multi CPU Macs have been out there for years... And boy, performance REALLY needs improving on the Mac.

I have both an Intel iMac and a MacBook on order, and will be happy to test out new versions of SL on them...

i just got my Intel iMac yesterday, and SL did run on it. I don't know if the version of SL I downloaded was a universal binary or not, but it did open and run. I didn't get to play around with it, so I don't know how good it ran... but it did in fact run.

How did the X1600 and X1800 fare?

Speaking of dual-core, will Second Life become multi-threaded, like the engines of Half Life 2, Doom 3, and Quake 4, to take advantage of current hardware?

Is it true that OpenGL isn't thread safe (e.g. only 1 thread per context)?

Here's some comparisons:

Second Life
Every setting disabled/at minimum (64 m clip distance, etc), except Object Detail at max, and performance settings (network, video ram, etc, at max). On the corner of an empty sim, viewing a cube of 1000 spheres 0.1 m each.

Quad 2.5 ghz Mac G5, 4.5 GB DDR2 RAM, OS X 10.4.4, Nvidia 6600 256MB PCIe:

21.5 fps at 800x600
18.8 fps at 1280x1024

Pentium 4 3.0 ghz PC, 1 GB DDR RAM, WinXP SP2, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB AGP4X:

39.4 fps at 800x600
33.5 fps at 1280x1024

(Could anything be done to further optimize the "RenderPool"? In normal situations, Avatar and Attachment Object Updates take just as much time, dropping FPS in-half. I wonder if Object Updates could be done on another cpu).

Doom 3 (a multi-threaded game)
All settings max/highest. At initial entry point of game.

Mac:

43 fps at 640x480
24 fps at 1280x1024

PC:

42 fps at 640x480
20 fps at 1280x1024

World of Warcraft (not multi-threaded, like SL)
All settings max/highest (except Color: 24 bits x 24 bits 1 x multisample). Random static test spot (looking towards Echo Isles on small island east of Sen'Jin Village in Durotar):

Mac:

16.9 fps at 1280x1024

PC:

31.5 fps at 1280x1024

Robin's response on SL Answers about this topic may be of interest!

Wow. I haven't heard such a nonanswer since the stump speeches for the '04 elections. It would be nice to get a pinned down answer. My PC desktop just died on me (Accidentally having a capacitor twisted off a motherboard when you close the clamshell case has a tendency to do that.) and I'm stuck using a laptop that can't run second life. The only hope I have is the MacBook I have ordered for February. I may have to ****can Second Life until an actual x86 client is up and running or until someone finds a work around to get Windows running on the Macintels. Not good. Not good.

I concur, the performance of SL under emulation is both impressive (the fact it works at all even, and is partially usable) and dissapointing (hardly usable).

A universal binary is needed badly. The new iMac is an awesome machine, I have it running on my 23" cinema display right now, and the thing is fantabulous, but I need my speed!

So, Universal binary please, thanks. Sooner than later, even if its somewhat crashy.

thanks !

Actually it sounds like a pretty good answer, they cant be expected to give a date as its in development, who knows what may show up in this process and if they did give a date and if it was delayed people would probably start moaning that its late.

They can give a basic answer as to when a beta will be out. This is done all the time in the software industry. Its called a roadmap. If they can't even give a rough ballpark as to what quarter it will be out, 3rd quarter '06 as an example, then I would suggest that a release is nowhere near the horizon. Again it sounds like politico speak - avoid the question with a vague and generally uninformative answer. Considering the above benchmarks on a freaking quad G5 vs. a standard PC I'm probably going to have to break down and fix my desktop computer because it's rather unimpressive on a Mac at this point in time.

...either because we want to see the inevitable wrinkles ironed out first or because our existing Macs are not old enough.

Question is: will the unversal binary version of SL run on G4/G5 Macs? if so, will there be an effect on perfomance?

My setup is PB12in, 1.5Ghz, 768 Megs Ram...optimized according to Brent Lindens wiki advice and still not fast

It should do... the whole point of a Universal application is that it contains separate code to run on both the PowerPC and Intel processors.


There might be a slight difference, depending on whether LL switch the compiler they are using at the same time. It's not likely to be a big difference, either way. Alas. (I have the 1.33Ghz version of the PB you have, so I sympathise).

I finally got my Intel iMac and see it does run under emulation. I'll have a MacBook soon as they start delivering them as well. SL did not run under the last system distributed with the developer transition machines, the last problem it had there had to do with OpenGL. So I'm glad they fixed that! For emulation, it runs pretty well, and I've only got 512MB RAM, I'd say about as good as on a 1GHz G4. It'll be exciting to see a native version. Looking forward to it!

My windoze box is dying and I was thinking instead of replacing it, I might instead replace my five-year old G4 with one of these shiny new intel macs.

I look forward to reading more about how SL runs on them, since the new mac would become my primary computer and would have to run SL well.

-Ghoti

We are starting the internal QA testing of the Universal Binary for Intel and PowerPC-based Macs this week. If all goes well we will be releasing the Universal Binary in a beta-state as soon as we clear it through QA. Keep your finger on the pulse of this thread, and also watch the Announcements forum for updates.

I Can't wait my PowerBook G4 1.67GHz / Radeon 9700 is running SL Better then my iMac Core Duo 1.83GHz / Radeon X1600

So it will be nice to get it

Some tests show that even Intel-native applications are slower, if they don't utilize the second core.

For example, here's QuickTime, which uses both cores. When both cores are enabled, it's 20% faster.

However, turn off one of the core's (aka Core Solo, which is all Second Life can use right now) and performance is 27% worse than a PowerPC:


Anandtech Intel Core Duo Review

As long as appliations like Second Life only utilize 1 core, a 1.83 Ghz Intel might only perform equal to a 1.33 Ghz G5.

I've long been frustrated that Second Life consumes 100% of 1 cpu, while another CPU sits idle.

Mac's have been dual-processor for years, but now that Intel's are finally going dual, hopefully we'll see more common applications take advantage of the extra processor(s).

Personally, I'm very happy that Second Life is only likely to use one of the processors in the Core Duo. Of course, it is really still multi-processor because that's really the way you have to think of the graphics subsystem these days.

Why do I not want Second Life to saturate both of my processors? Well, mainly because I hate it when it does that on my PC. For example, on the PC, if I am scripting and switch from Second Life to something like the LSL wiki I get absolutely terrible response because SL is still using all the resources it can.

By comparison, on the new iMac, I can run Second Life and still get really good response out of browsers, e-mail and the like because they get to use the other core. This is a good thing for me, because I need to be able to do these things at the same time as running SL.

This is exactly what the Adobe guys used to say about multi processors and Photoshop: it wasn't that the second processor really always made anything much faster, but the overall experience was much snappier because there was always some CPU power available to do other things.

For someone running SL as a pure viewer, I can see that this might not apply. But not everyone wants SL to have sole ownership of their machine.

Just my $0.02.

Thank you.

thats not exactly right though. This wasnt a test of software only using a single core, it was a test of software using the Core Duo processor with 1 processor physcially disabled. It could very well have a bad affect when one is disabled, as some things are interconnected, and the L2 cache is shared.

Most all benchmarks show different results than this one. Even on that link you gave, they said that the test on the G5 actually took 25 minutes not 9 minutes when it was set to automatic performance. This means it wasnt scaling the G5 right and they could only get the faster number by forcing it to max speed. That isnt an option (yet) to do on the Core Duo chips in OSX. Its possible the OSX version of quicktime here has a bug in it, or the OS, that is also affecting the Core Duo as well.

plus the FPU in the G5 is a lot faster, so its no wonder it can do FPU intensive things faster

the Core Duo is a better processor overall, but not in every way.