To EVERYONE having issues with the Mac client, READ THIS

I posted this as a reply to another post, but felt it deserved its own post:

To the folks having trouble with SL slowing down on Macs, LISTEN TO ME PLEASE.

Go into advanced graphics options and DROP THE GRAPHICS MEMORY SETTING TO HALF OF WHAT YOU ACTUALLY HAVE.

This should COMPLETELY fix the problem.

I don't know *WHY* LL is still shipping the client with the video RAM usage equal to RAM on the card. This is what is leading to 95% of complaints about the Mac client at the moment, as Apple has fixed their video drivers and there are no longer any glitches or issues there.

This has been a problem for two years now and it's still ongoing. Mac OS X uses a lot of GPU RAM for itself, and you need to reduce SL's usage to keep video RAM from running out which causes texture thrashing.

Notice that it runs well for a few minutes; this is because not all the textures have loaded yet. As soon as they do load and video RAM runs out, performance will fall through the floor.

Heed my tip; this post's text should be branded into the side of the Mac port maintainer so he FIXES this default once and for all.

-Zorin, exasperated.

thank u , but i cant find advanced graphic options , only quality and preformens?
By the way , its my first Mac -and i cant find the delete button --((:
Another think when i push on cmd or alt buttons -sl stopps or changing resolution
thank u

THANK YOU!!!!!

hugs and kisses**

Still a combarable bad performance, but much, much better now!!!!!

Appendix;

Wahhh. Major system lock up while atmospheric shaders enabled, wow. Still crashes the entire system on UI resize and logging out of full screen mode is a nice sudden death...

But as long as you keep atmospheric shaders disabled and avoid the critical tasks it seems to run at almost the speed i got with Nicholaz 1.18. Dunno how it affects a long term usage yet.

Btw, you can fix it in the Graphic Preferences Window by 1. Check the "Custom" option, then in the appearing window click "Hardware Options", then set the slider down to half of the default setting (like 128 for a 254 MB GPU, 64 for a 128 MB GPU).

Thanks for the idea Zorin but SL on my Mac Pro with the ATI X1900 card just cant handle WL.

In OSX with all WL settings on i crash with TP's and sim crossings.
The Map takes ages to open, and it's all just visibly slower.

I really hate to say it but in XP via bootcamp with the settings at max it's snappy and TP's are instant, I can fly in and out of two sims like there is no crossing.

I know the X1900 is almost three years old now but it cant be all ATI fault as its fine in XP.
I hoping that the rumoured 8800GT will come out soon, maybe the new Nvidia drivers will handle SL better

Dario, I have the same computer and video card you have, and SL runs like a champ for me. I'm using the latest version of OS X Leopard and the latest ATI drivers and OSX Graphics patch, and I can use my full 512 MB of VRAM.

What OS version are you on? Are you CERTAIN you have the latest graphics card drivers?

Hi Ceera, Im on the latest Leopard 10.5.2 and have all the updates apple have pushed to me, i think the last graphics update was in November.

here's what it says in the about second life box...taken while in the Nicholas 1.18.3 client

CPU: 4 x i386 (Unknown) (2660 MHz)
Memory: 7168 MB
OS Version: Darwin 9.2.2 Darwin Kernel Version 9.2.2: Tue Mar 4 21:17:34 PST 2008; root:xnu-1228.4.31~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
Graphics Card Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon X1900 OpenGL Engine
OpenGL Version: 2.0 ATI-1.5.24

This is bizarre because we have exactly the same hardware and software configuration, yet on my system it runs smooth as silk without any real problems.

Did you purchase your X1900 in late 2006? There were QC problems with the first batch that caused the things to cook themselves and become unstable. I had these problems and got mine replaced under AppleCare and my problems went away. Hopefully you have AppleCare on your system so you can get your card swapped if that's the case.

Also, get a small vacuum cleaner and vacuum out the heatsink. The thing collects dust like crazy and eventually the fan won't be able to spin fast enough to keep it from overheating == crash.

Good luck!

I got the card as a built to order option in May 2007. I added a new drive for time machine last week so i had a little clean up inside at the time, Im not sure the card is faulty as its fine in XP.

RC4 is pretty stable an usable with all WL features off, i just have glow on, but add reflections and the sky and it just seams to choke :/

Other games work fine, i tried the tomb raider demo last week and its just as good as the XP demo i tried last year.

I have a new imac 2.4 Intel Core Duo and SL kept crashing or slowing down to about 5fps. This occurred always after I logged on for a few minutes. The browser would get progressively slower. I reinstalled SL. I zapped my pram. Then I set my preferences lower. I then thought it could be certain objects I had that were slowing things down. But after deleting and moving things around it was still bad.

This is a memory issue as this post indicated.

Go into preferences. Click on the graphics tab. Then go into Hardware Options.

Set the Texture memory to almost half of what is recommended. I have mine set to 128mb. The lag problem disappeared immediately.

I don't know if this problem is a mac or a second life bug. But texture memory seems to be the key.

OMG, this is baaaad!
I had no problems with the realease candidate before. But now:
-White trees
-when I move mouse, avi moves too
-cant use the dropdown menus
-toolmenu disabled
-cant create
-cant delete, take or anythig else from pie
-mighty mouse doenst work, but normal mouse is no better
-cam doesnt follow avi
-and probably much much more...
((
Does anyone have a link to the 1.19 Release Candidate for MAC? Or is there no way out?
If that is the case that might mean the end of SL for me..

C

>To the folks having trouble with SL slowing down on Macs, LISTEN TO ME PLEASE.
>Go into advanced graphics options and DROP THE GRAPHICS MEMORY SETTING TO HALF >OF WHAT YOU ACTUALLY HAVE.
>This should COMPLETELY fix the problem.

didn't change a thing. system crash within 5 mins...
thanks for tryin.

Here's the link to 1.19.1.4 cyberrosa

http://release-candidate-secondlife-com.s3.amazonaws.com/SecondLife_1_19_1_4_RELEASECANDIDATE.dmg

Cheers!

My specs are almost identical, except that I have less RAM installed.

CPU: 4 x i386 (Unknown) (2660 MHz)
Memory: 2048 MB
OS Version: Darwin 9.2.2 Darwin Kernel Version 9.2.2: Tue Mar 4 21:17:34 PST 2008; root:xnu-1228.4.31~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
Graphics Card Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon X1900 OpenGL Engine
OpenGL Version: 2.0 ATI-1.5.24

Mine was purchased in December 2007, literally one day too early for me to return it and get the newer one that came out in January.

This is very interesting, and can be ultimately, I think, traced back to the fact that LL never figured out how to get fullscreen rendering to work in Leopard (since its a straight port and its one poor schlep maintaining it). Seriously Linden Labs, you should be embarrassed yet again. Full screen rendering in most operating systems (including leopard) should unload the GUI from video RAM (which things like WoW do nicely) and then back again when you quit.

But it's true, Leopard's core GUI takes up video RAM along with anything else that wants to, and its inexcusable, utterly that SL doesn't know how to deal with this.

Again, another problem with straight ports.

Do a native port, Lindens. Why don't you show us that you actually have SOME kind of programming talent over there. So far all you've done is patch together a bunch of broken crap that other people have come up with.

The previous post for 1.19.0 viewer was for 1.19.1, anyone else have that link? I am running 1.19.0 on my MBP, but my Mac tower, my son updated it to 1.19.1 and with the mighty mouse he cant get it to work. grrrr, I know they had a link to the 1.19.0 after they released 1.19.1 as I got this copy from that post.

Thanks ahead of time if u can help.

Scarlet

This is possibly a dumb question: would running SL under boot camp with XP and SP2 fix any of these problems?

Also, does anyone else freeze up entirely with their Macs when trying to take a hi-res snapshot?

Yes, it fixes all of them actually. I've run SL under Vista with Bootcamp, and also XP with bootcamp, and absolutely none of the mac-specific problems described in this thread (or in this forum that I can tell) exist under either operating system on my Macbook Pro. (Intel, 2.4ghz core duo, 4GB RAM, NVIDIA 8600, etc)

I have tried this so-called "solution" to the problem. It does jack s***.

My client still freezes up all the damn time, mainly in high-prim sims with lots of other avs around, but not hardly ever when I'm all by myself way up in outer space in my private land.

Of course if you use SL for combat gaming purposes like me, then having the client freeze for 20 seconds every few minutes is crippling and makes the system completely unusable.

I have maxed out all the possible settings on my MacBoook Pro: 4GB RAM, 200GB 7200RPM hard drive (with plenty of free HD space for virtual memory tasks and disk cache), and I am running on minimized settings in the client. I also have a gaming router which prioritizes SL network traffic, and I consistently get 800-1000 kb/sec.

My FPS increases if I am running at a lower graphics settings, but it does fix the constant freezing, and frequent client crashes, which I attribute to memory leaks or something.

-=GE=-

I have a brand new 8-core Mac tower with an Nvidia 8800 card and hi-rez snaps lock me up for 5+ minutes, then crash the client.

By the way, this fix (reducing graphics memory from 512 to 256) doesn't change the lock up problem.

I'm running either 1.20.9 or 1.19.4 and neither clients work properly with a new Nvidia mac

Okay, this is odd, but it solved the Mac hi-rez snapshot screen freeze for me (your experiences may vary).

Use the normal snapshot window, rather than CTRL + (tilde). In the "what image size do you need?" section, go to Custom, then type in the dimensions you want (e.g. if your SL window is 1,667 x 1,002, like mine is on a 21" monitor, double that to 3,334 x 2,004 -- remember to double both dimensions or you'll get a distorted image.) THEN -- AND THIS IS THE REALLY, REALLY, IMPORTANT PART -- Un-check "constrain proportions."

If your experience is like mine, when you hit Refresh, your screen image will hop around five or six times almost as if it's sampling the various quadrants of the image, then settle back to your original crop. Hitting save will then save to disk without a hitch.

The hopping around thing is a bit weird, but non-damaging a far as I can tell and the save to disk takes less than a second (so maybe the hopping saves time, who knows?).

All I know is that now I can take hi-rez pics without crashing. /happy sigh

(this solution was provided by Andrew at Linden Lab support, thank you Andrew!)

I was fine till I upgraded to leopard and the latest client. messed with every setting I could try. As a last ditch effort I moved everything out of ~/Library/Application Support/Second Life. And voila, the new client works perfectly now. Well. as perfectly as you can expect SL to run

What computer do you have? Also, how does the framerates compare to running it in XP or Vista? Further what do you mean by "latest client" -- which version precisely?

-=GE=-

It's a miracle - call the Pope!

I've been seriously driven half crazy since the newest RC version update and no changes to any settings have helped. I followed your advice about the ~/Library/Application Support/Second Life folder and SL now works normally.

I love you.