Second Life fine under Leopard, but MBP-nVidia problem survives

Word has been gradually seeping through the various mac user groups in Second Life saying that Leopard runs SL stably - with the usual provisos that some prefer various other clients (the Nicholaz-s patch from Barney Boomslang is my firm favourite, there are those who love the OnRez client too). My copy of Leopard arrived today, so it was with some anticipation I installed it and fired up SL - including the new Release Candidate.

I'm happy to add my support to SL under Leopard on just about every type of machine - and like many users I'm seeing an appreciable rise in fps, of about 25%. The only cautionary note - the issue with the nVidia graphics cards in Mac Book Pros still lingers. Hopefully soon!

Reader Comments (6)

Thanks, Eloise, for posting on this topic. I hear reports of increased lag by users with all flavors of computers, but my Mac friends and most that I hear from in the Macintosh User group report dramatic increases in lag since Leopard was installed. I reported on the Jira (https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-905) about this and have not heard an official response. I can see how it would affect some machines differently. The good news is I've yet to see an example of the other common bug, striped textures (https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1001).

Perhaps it is the ATI Radeon X1600 OpenGL Engine that is affected by the lag issue. It does seem to be responsible for the striped textures as it was the Windows version of the card that gave me the same problem when I had a PC.

I suppose I should be grateful that SL even has a Mac client, but having used Windows and Mac, it seems to be optimized for the former. But I don't know how long I can continue in SL when my frame rates are consistently below 10fps in some of my favorite sims.

You must be on at different times to me, or in a different mac group, but I'm sorry to hear of your issues.

I would say that SL seems to run very differently on PCs and Macs. Macs rarely achieve the same fps as similar PCs, but for almost all situations (other than the MBP nVidia bug) seem to be far more stable and to run smoothly with lower fps (although badly with time distortion). This is just my personal experience though everyone has a different story.

You may be right identifying your graphics card as an issue though - SL does seem to critically depend on your graphics card, and I guess I got lucky. All the best with getting it sorted.

Thanks for posting this - I was hoping the MBP / nVidia issue would have been resolved. I guess I'm still stuck booting into Vista through BootCamp. I do look forward to trying it out once I get Leopard as I can certainly use a 25% increase in frame rates.

And as far as stability, I never thought I'd say it - but using my MBP with Vista is far more stable than using OS-X while running SecondLife. Sometimes this seems to be more an issue with the way Linden releases their clients as major new versions almost always end up crashing repeatedly under OS-X while working just fine under Windows.

I was chatting to a friend yesterday who uses a G4 laptop and an Intel iMac.

Her comment: Although far slower, SL is far more stable on her G4 machine than on her iMac.

Whilst this is still anecdotal (1 piece of evidence isn't that useful here) I'm wondering how true it is. I know there are intel Mac users out there who are still seriously happy with their performance and stability, but the PowerPC chip users seem happier with stability (whilst less so with fps) from the chat I've seen.

Can I also ask if you've tried the Nicholaz patch for you mac client? People on both intel and PPC who have tried it report increased stability and performance. Some people also swear by the OnRez client. Personally speaking I don't like it - there's a lot of muscle memory to overcome with button positions and the first release had a colour scheme that gave me migraines - but there are those who swear by it.

I find Leopard + Nicholaz to be better on my MacBook Pro (2 Ghz, 2 Gbyte RAM, ATI x1600). Also, you can now run SL in Windows, using Parallels, and the CPU usage seems better balanced (Activity Monitor) than in Tiger.

since upgrading to leopard, i find the current release version of sl and the current release candidate both to be horribly slow, jerky, stuttery, crashy, and every other bad word ending in "y". It's almost unusable at times.

Recommendations were to decrease the vram setting to half that of the physical vram size, and I did. Also recommended was enabling VBO, which I did. Not much help, in either case.

I have a Core 2 Duo 2.16 Ghz MBP with the ATI X1600 (128 meg version) and 2 gigs of RAM.

Second Life fine under Leopard, but MBP-nVidia problem survives

Reader Comments (6)

Posted: Nov 3rd 2007 12:29PM (Unverified) said

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