Disappointed in SL on OS X

Hi,

I started using SL early this year and had a great deal of fun and actually did some real work. Back then I was running it on a 6 year old PC. It didn't run great, but it ran well enough. I recently returned to graduate school and was excited to hear about the "educatonal" stuff that SL had in the works. As a student on a limited budget, I bought what I could - a fairly decent 12" iBook that does 99% of what I want it too. But over the last few updates SL performance on OS X has been getting worse and worse. I've read the posts, I've tweaked my preferences. These days I am luck if I can login and stand around for a while.

I look around me on campus and see a great number of students also using Macs and wonder how descreasing performance for Macs aligns with the supposed "educational" activites that I hear about. It would be one thing if SL was just slow like it was when I first joined, but the requirements seem to keep going up. After yet another crash, I dragged my PC out of the closet only to find that its aging graphics card is no longer supported.

Lindens if you're reading this, please consider all us poor students who really would like to make the dream of SL educatonal spaces come true and can't afford more memory and faster graphics cards every few months, let alone putting time and effort into something to only be shut out.

Agreed here, even on my Power Mac performance isn't what it once was. When occlusion culling was first added I was over-joyed to find I was getting upwards of 40fps in my home and 20-30fps in places I commonly visit. Now I'm lucky to get a high of 15fps IN MY HOME, but they keep denying that anything has changed.
And that's not mentioning the freezes I now get which I think are OC related (when I enter or exit a building SL will freeze for a second or two).

I am a Mac user myself. Unfortunately, a large part of the problem that Mac users have with running SL is because of the comparatively limited, and often non-upgradable, video cards that Apple insists on shipping Macs with. Some of the really expensive Macs can come with a decent video card for SL. But iBooks, Mac Minis, and other low end Macs that are within a normal student's budget usually have pretty wimpy video cards in them. The new generation of Mac Minis have a whopping 64 MB of VRAM, while it takes more like 256 MB VRAM to get decent SL performance.

For those of us who have noticed a decline in video performance as SL grows, a lot of that is that the SL Client, on ALL platforms, is doing a terrible job managing cache. Since the Macs tend to have less VRAM, the cache problems hurt us worse.

I love my Mac dearly, but I am slowly trying to piece together a Wintel system just to play SL on. Why? Because with replacable, readily available video cards, I can put together a Wintel system with better video capabilities than a Mac that is 4 times the same price.

I think that the 64mb in MacBooks should be enough to run it playably, but the main issue with that machine is that's 64mb of RAM, not VRAM, as it's shared main-memory, and the graphics chip itself isn't the greatest (it's an Intel's own one *shudders*).
That's the trouble with early adoption of some of these systems, it will likely be the next generation of MacBooks before you get 'proper' graphics cards. That said though, it isn't a gaming machine.

But at the same time, as my sig says I have a PowerMac with a 256mb NVidia 6800 and it struggles too.

I will chime in here and agree with everyone, but I would like to point out that it's not *that* bad and the hardware is not as big a part of the story as the way they keep screwing up the the game itself.

To the original OP, that iBook you got is just not a good machine, nor is it even remotely current. The iBook was entry level when it came out and is now a defunct model. If you bought it as recently as you said, it must be an older second hand one as well.

As to the poor performance of SL, the others are right in that it's the cache (or lack of one) and the changes they made when they "optimised" the server routines over the last few updates that have ruined the performance, not so much the Mac hardware specifically.

A good Mac with enough memory and good graphics will run SL very wel indeed all other things being equal or okay.

The problem is those "other things." (like the poor coding of the Mac client and the generally poor choices LL seems to have made across the board lately).

The graphics chip in the Mac mini and the Macbooks, as well as the low end iMac, shouldn't be used for anything but "home theatre" use. For anything that uses T&L (such as, well, Second Life), the original Mac Mini with its 1.4 GHz G4 and 32M Radeon 9200 gets similar benchmark scores, and the GMA950 only does that well because Apple uses one of the "Core Duo" cores to run OpenGL... the chip itself can't do T&L at all.

The Radeon 9200 qualifies as "bare minimum to play SL if you don't move much".

So "not the greatest" is praising with faint damns.

I'll agree with that, seeing as that's one step below what I got and about as much as I do these days (I have a 9250).

I have been trying to act within SL for a couple of weeks, on a new mac powerbook on OSX 10.4.6. Your comment "These days I am lucky if I can login and stand around for a while. " describes my experience so far. It is very frustrating, as I was really looking forward to SL, as I was once a "Civilisation" addict, but now don't game. This is real, and I want to play.

Now I might enter at work, but only briefly, and won't be able to fully participate. Lindens, are you working on SL for the Mac? Can anyone help?

What do you mean by "a new Mac powerbook"?

* A refurbished or old-stock Power-PC?
* A new intel-based Macbook (not a Macbook Pro)?

In the first case:

The last version of the G4 chip used in the Powerbooks only had a 200 MHz system bus. Apple wasn't willing to wait for Freescale to have the MPC8641D dual-core G4 with dual 768 MHz memory busses ready, so the system bandwidth available on Powerbooks is always going to be a bottleneck.

A good GPU can make up for it, and you should be getting better than "just standing around" performance if you have the most recent Powerbooks. If your "Powerbook" is an iBook you're out of luck, they have GPUs that are only slightly better than the 9200.

In the second case:

The GPU in the Macbooks (non-pro) is not adequate for running any 3D game that uses T&L, like Second Life. The GPU has no T&L support at all, and it has to be emulated on the CPU itself... slowly.

Windows-based laptops using this chip are unlikely to even work, slowly or not. This is not a "Mac" issue. This is a "hardware" issue.

the base apple book on their website atm is 1099us$
the same computer (with a larger screen) on hp running windows is 834us$

apple is getting 265 $ for the privliage of running osX

if i were shopping for a laptop id personally tolerate windows and use that almost 300$ in getting a better computer, one maby that has a graphics card supported by SL

And well worth it. I'm paying a lot more than that for the privilege of running OS X and don't begrudge it one bit. It's got problems, here and there, but the difference between OS X problems and Windows problems is like the difference between a stubbed toe and bone cancer.

You're better off buying TWO computers, one for everything that matters in First Life, running OS X, and one for Second Life running Windows. That's what I did, and if you don't ever do anything but run SL on it Windows doesn't hurt much at all.