Running SL on a Mac

Hi!

I have been offered home use of an iMac 27" - spec as follows:

# 2.66GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5
# 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x2GB
# 1TB Serial ATA Drive
# ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB
# 8x double-layer SuperDrive

by my employer - which is great! But before I disconnect my PC and put it away for a while can anyone tell me if they have had any problems running SL on a Mac. Anything I should look out for? Anyone gonna tell me DONT DO IT!!!

Any comments gratefully received with interest

I own a 21" iMac with similar specs.

Do it.

ATI drivers suck on PC due to broken OpenGL implementation, I have absolutely no idea how this works out on a Mac. Please keep us posted...

And hey, how could one refuse something like....27"??? thats mega cool.

OS X is better at handling OpenGL and OpenCL. The set up may take a little tweaking, but it should run well once you have it set.

That should rock like a hurricane.

That should run Second Life and most anything else very well.

I have a Mac too. No problems here. Do it!!!

Should be no problem. Mac runs SL just fine, and on Mac the ATI drivers are NOT the problem they are on PC. The Mac you mention should run SL with no problems.

Cool! Just what I wanted to hear! Thanks everyone!

Been running SL on a variety of Macs, with a couple different viewers, for 2 years without a hitch. Video is gorgeous. Go for it!

I have run SecondLife Mac on:

1. an iMac 24", 2.8Ghz Core 2 Duo standard ATI card
2. same machine but with an nVidia 8800GS
3. an iMac 27", i7 (2.8Gz), ATI 4850

Notes on 1:

SecondLife runs well enough on this machine however if I encountered a sim which had a significant amount of small textures or many prims, frame rate would lower. In this configuration I always used the standard viewer (see notes below) and would only turn on multiple threads.

Also see common notes for 1 and 2.

Notes on 2:

I upgraded the video card (at a ridiculous cost I might add) and this did improve my SL experience. The quality of rendering is what I noticed the most although my frame rate did improve. However, I discovered the other viewers in this iteration and tried out the release candidate viewer(s), Snowglobe and Emerald.

Emerald was the best balance for me. Although Snowglobe did render faster and would allow me to use some particularly difficult to render sims (Tempura is beautiful but oh so resource intensive), I found that Emerald rendered the nicest picture.

Common notes for 1 and 2:

Always use mutliple threads for rendering. Always make sure you have the RenderAppleMultipleGL debug setting set to true. DO NOT try to turn around very quickly after first landing. All the viewers, bar Snowglobe, are really bad at utterly refusing to reload random textures and would just leave them gray until one somehow forced the viewer to take notice (I would just try to edit the texture or look closer at the missing texture).

Notes for 3:

Everything renders beautifully under Snowglobe. There's no noticeable difference between it and Emerald and I won't use the official viewers because their performance in my experience is not as good as Snowglobe or Emerald. Although I would generally have stayed with Emerald it still has the annoying refuse to download texture issue whereas Snowglobe doesn't.

I can't tell the difference between Emerald and Snowglobe as far as rendering goes (well I can but on this machine is negligible) so I'm sticking with Snowglobe for the moment.

Before, I mentioned Tempura. On my new machine Tempura didn't render below about 8 FPS after the initial texture downloads which for Tempura is quite amazing. It would generally sit around 10-20 (whereas on the 24" iMac it would sit at about 5 FPS if one was lucky).

Other notes:

I also have a Windows 7 machine with an Intel Core 2 Quad E6600 (original Quad Core, 2.4 ghz) with an ATI 4890. Its frame rates are worse than both my iMacs although all the viewers lack the "We're going to refuse to download the texture and leave it grey because this provides a wonderful experience" bug.

So, yes, your i5 should run SL quite well!

Gotta love that terrabyte HD!

And that boss! Lol.

You should be fine.

From the specs given, and from what other Mac users have said.... it should be fine. I'd just be careful about using a company computer for SL. Companeez haf a vay of seeink things zatchoo do on yourrr kompany provided komputer.

This makes sense. PC's run both OGL and DirectX. Stands to reason ATI might've made some tweaks on the PC side. I've never had issues with either.