Windlight and Macs?

First of all - I love Windlight!

Unfortunately, my Mac cannot run at anywhere remotely close to reasonable with atmospheric shaders turned on. In my workshop skybox, I can run without atmospheric shaders at about 10FPS (a bit lower than what I am used to), but once i click that atmospheric shaders checkbox, FPS plummets to .9 or lower.

The original FL/WL did not have such a severe hit - what has changed, and is there anything I can do to run the general WL effects and still actually be able to function?

Edit:
As an addendum, i am running SL on a Mac non-Intel Powerbook. 1.67GHz, 1.5GB RAM. My Graphics card is an ATI Radion 9600 XT.

:\\ non-intel will most probably be a buzzkill offthabat... i understand that sl-mac/intel is much closer to the pc optimized version, and has a lot of speed advantages. (but, that was even before windlight)

Aki,
I have a G5 2ghz dual processor, 1 gig memory and the stock Radeon 9600 128 video card. The first look viewer with the default settings was very slow last night when I tried it. When I clicked "sky" on in preferences, SL became usuable. Chat, camera, moving, anything had a 60 second lag. I was very disappointed. I am currently looking into more memory and a new video card. I hate spending the cash. I have my fingers crossed hoping it will help. I had really wanted to try using windlight.

I've just switched my preferences to pre-windlight looks (basically set to medium on the bar, with atmospheric shader (and thus water reflections) turned off.

I'm now getting around 3 times the frame-rate I do on the main viewer, sitting at a pretty comfortable 25 - 30fps, and it performs better in crowded areas where I would crawl before. Very pleased.

Just needs a few more bugs fixed and I'm happy =)

I agree, without atmo shaders, the viewer works much better. The client appears to draw fewer frames in instances of little to no change, and the av impostor thing seems to help a lot too.

I guess I'm just dismayed that something that turned out so nicely in the initial release (and ran reasonably well) is now a complete show stopper for me, given I cannot move an inch with it enabled.

I would be interested to know if all Mac users are experiencing this. Clearly Molly has a better setup than I do (graphic card notwithstanding).

Is this Mac specific? or more related to the graphic card?

Hmm, I can run atmospheric shaders and water reflections (all static objects), but it drops me back down to pre-windlight frame-rates which for me was around 10 fps with a lot of choppiness everywhere but my home. I have about the same object detail etc. as I used before (is hard to tell with the new sliders, plus LOD works a bit better now).

May I ask what your system is running? (Processory, RAM, video card etc) Just curious.

My Mac used to be high-end:
Mac OS X (v10.4.11) on PowerMac G5 Dual 2.5ghz (SL rarely hits the other processor), 4gb RAM, 320gb across 2 striped hard-drives, NVidia 6800 Ultra (256mb).

If changes have been made to land textures, they render badly in OS 10.5 Leopard, and Windows XP running parallels. However, they render correctly under BootCacmp XP using the same system.

MacBook Pro, 10.5.1, 2Ghz Intel Core Duo,Radeon x1600

I've been running the Windlit client on a MacBook Pro 15", 2.33 GHz w/ ATI Radeon chipset. Bugs I have discovered are also present on the Windows version, so I've been pretty happy so far. Performance to this point is about similar to the current release of the client.

It's unusable for me... I get less than 1FPS on the latest Macbook Pro. Nvidia card.

What settings are you running? My recommendation is to set the graphics to "Mid" then select the "Custom" checkbox and turn off "Atmospheric Shaders", it puts you back to the previous lighting system which isn't as good, but it will hopefully run much smoother.

Im set to 'mid' and 128M draw distance on my MBP. i have an ATI card, but i'd think nvidia would be friendlier.

So far the only odd effect i get is an unattractive flicker effect with glow, when moving.

In case it helps anyone .

That's rather vague though, isn't it? What is 'stable' to LL? I do not have the graphics card Pastrami specified, nor do I run Leopard.

By his statement, I should be seeing equal performance running Windlight as though I were running the normal client?

Clearly this is not the case. As a PB user, I have *always* experienced poor framerates, but never this low, and most certainly not under the previous Windlight candidate.

It's rather distressing that Mac overall get the shaft. It's great that there is Mac support *at all*, but given that there *is* such a large Mac community using the software, one would think that further tweaks towards overal Mac performance would be in store?

Have there been any specific statements thus far as to whether overall FPS for Macs will be improved?

I tried it on low and it still didn't help. Sure I can turn it off (in theory anyway, in practice it crashes when I do), but seeing as how I have a brand new, well within specs computer, it's not really the point. I shouldn't be left out in the cold with a new machine, and I can't even see how my products hold up in the new lighting. Thanks though

Just had a dabble with Windlight for the 1st time yesterday. Initially I was so dismayed I trashed it.

Set on high I was only getting 0.9 - 3 fps. So after 5 minutes of playing around, I quit out and trashed Windlight.

After reading a little more on the forums I decided to give it another go today.

As everyone seems to say... set to mid (Atmospheric Shaders off), things are much better. Average fps are now 20 - 25, although busier scenes are round 9 - 15 fps.

Just a shame I can't make the most out of Windlight at this stage.

My machine was new in late June this year. Specs are...
iMac 20", 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB ram, ATI Radeon X1600 graphics card (256MB vram), OSX 10.4.8.

WindLight is usable on my computer, but there are two bugs that are rather annoying. One is that SL allocates too much texture memory, and runs up against the fact that OS X also uses the graphics card's texture memory to render the GUI, so with SL's memory setting set to what the card's amount of memory is, it'll get about half full and then my FPS will drop suddenly to 2-4fps, and stay that way until I lower SL's memory setting. (I imagine this might be the root of a lot of people's performance issues.) Unfortunatly in Windlight I can only set this to 256 or -2032. The other problem doesn't affect performance, but it is annoying, and that's that the ground textures show up incorrectly when atmospheric shaders are enabled.

As far as Leopard affecting graphics performance, the only difference I've found is that the problem with it allocating too much memory happens more often than with Tiger. But it did happen with Tiger too, so I don't think it's a Leopard issue other than the fact that Leopard uses more graphics memory.

My system:
iMac 20" - Intel Core 2 Duo 2.43GHz
Memory - 2gb
Graphics card - ATi Radeon 2600 HD Pro (256mb)
Mac OS X 10.5.1 (Leopard)

JIRA Issues:
SL Allocating too much memory - http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2763
Incorrect Ground Textures - http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-3160

No mac version of SL has ever run at anything above a slideshow crawl on my MacBook Pro. 2.4GHz, Nvidia 8600GS, 4GB RAM. Am I doing something wrong?

I'm running XP with Bootcamp on a MacBook Pro 2.4ghz. 2gb RAM (booted from XP partition)

Everything looks ok except that when I click and at random, the screen will turn a bright red.
but if i hold the mouse button down, it will not stay red. I have also seen it flash yellow and teal.

I've tweaked the settings over & over- no luck. But then I dont even know how to see what my frame rate is... It must be ok, because I dont have problems moving around, just the annoying color flashes

I havent seen any one else comment on this issue.

Any clues?

Hmm. Something changed in the current windlight viewer from one version to the next.

I was running it ok (not fantastic, but I could gawp at the shiny and still do stuff), until a forced update, after that, I could barely get SL to accept the quit command, it ran so badly. This is on a Macbook Pro 2.33 with the ATI graphics and on OSX 10.4.10 (the latest Tiger). So it's neither nVidia, nor Leopard, and it worked fine until the forced update. I went back to my old nicholaz client instead.

Just posting my feedback...
I just installed leopard.. and noticed very very poor performances with WL and actually atmospheric shaders on, like constantly 5fps , this evening I got bored cos my AV turned black.. so I tried to disable the shaders, and dang.. 35 fps!!!!!
So..
Hello LL coders... your shaders eat 30 fps on leopard , go buy a copy from your nearest apple store and work on it...

Aria.

P.S.
MacBook Pro core duo blabla x1600 ati, 2gb ram, 256 vram

Hmm, same thing happened to me. Same laptop, same OS. The initial release ran fine, but the updates since all operate at 1 fps, with a constant ~1 second latency showing.

Very disappointing.

15-30 FPS (or more) for me on Windlight.

I am running tiger on macbook pro and the latest version will not even load for me. It just spins until I force quit. Previous version was fine until I zoomed in and out and had things disappear from my screen but they were still there - because I couldn't walk through them.