Unusable

I am running a Dual G4 PPC Mac with a Gig of RAM. I have a chump graphics card, no denying it; an ATI Rage 9000 with 64MB of RAM or some such BS; while this is admittedly not the most sizzling combo on the market, it should be able to run this client without complaint.

However.

Its absolutely miserable. Navigation is all but impossible even at a walk. When this code moves into production, if the performance is no better than this, I will be finished with it.

I'm 99% certain your poor performance is mostly due to your antique video card. Please see the SL tech support wiki here, where the following information is found:



SL is much more demanding on your video card than you might suppose, mainly because everything in-world is dynamically streamed. It can't be loaded onto your hard drive once and for all like a typical "game," because it's always changing, because 98% of what exists in SL is created by US -- the users -- and we change things all the time.

You chould be able to get a more up-to-date video card for not too awful much money -- an nVidia would be recommended. The system requirements suggest a minimum of an nVidia GeForce 2, GeForce 4mx, or better, or an ATI Radeon 8500, 9250, or better, although the RECOMMENDED configuration for a Mac is an nVidia GeForce FX 5600, GeForce 6600, or better, or a ATI Radeon 9600, X600, or better.

Hope things work out for you!

P2

Maybe Skalligrim meant to say "Radeon 9000". I don't see a listing for "Rage 9000" on ATI's website.

Mac performance is really, really bad on any Radeon under anything less than a 9600. A Radeon 9000 card is capable of running the program; we can't really say that it's an enjoyable experience.

... and even on a ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 (used to come standard with the PowerBooks...)

Lee, any info on when the vertex shaders for the Mac are going to be activated again on the Preview? I miss half of my performance (the same drop of performance happens if I turn the "avatar vertex program" off in 1.9.0)

Google "ATI Rage 9000." There are quite a few references, most of them referring specifically to Macs.

P2

As per the advice of the Macintosh Users group in-world, I went to atitech.com and upgraded my drivers. This has made a considerable improvement in performance (read overall speed) in both the preview and the current production client.

This gives me some degree of hope. We'll see how it goes, I suppose.

BTW, in spite of what crystal space build environement my report, the card I have appears to be an 'ATI Radeon 9000 Pro'.

Cheers,
Fletch

The Rage cards were awesome in their day, but iirc stopped after 16mb, maybe 32mb tops. The Rave rendering system was really good and pretty damned speedy (on my old 400mhz g3 iMac a game in Rave rendering ran a full 100% faster than the same one using OpenGL!).

[/aside]

You should be able to get up a Radeon 9700 or 9800 as high as 128mb. Those will serve you much better than the card you have, you can sometimes nab the Mac ones at a decent price on eBay or refurbished Mac parts stores (in the US at least, not so much luck here in the UK )

Actually this one has 64MB, and technically, I am given to understand, is a radeon, not a rage.

Cheers
Skalligrim/Fletch