So what is LL's problem with Macs?

[Loki Eliot]

Aple are about to bring out new iMacs and it has been a year since i got my current iMac with the intel quad core i7 16GB ram with AMD Radeon HD 6970M with 2GB . And even though my SL has improved alot there is still major issues with FPS that are not related to LAG. 

I'm just wondering if Linden Lab know what the issues are yet? I think i read somewhere it might have had something to do with OpenGL 3.2 used in OSX Lion. Or simply because of OpenGL issues with AMD. 

So after a year, does anyone have a better understanding of whats going on?

And with the new iMacs coing out soon, what would be the best graphics card they could put in them that would gain the best SL performance?

[Lukeh Ghost]

I've noticed then when scowering the JIRA that Mac users have Second Life issues, my friend went to an iMac 27in something or other but Second Life wasn't as good as her old computer which was custom built for high end games so returned it and got another computer again.

Funny thing is when coding Apple iPhone Apps, and Android apps you'd think that different OS's different companies different languages but I was surprised when I found out how similar it all is, so whether it's the viewer's coding or not seems it wouldn't be unless .exe applications and .dmg applications are coded different I don't know I hate big applications lol.

Maybe it is something to do with the Apple Mac OS and their relation with the Graphics card. I do know when Apple create new iPhones they keep the software and hardware staff in the dark about each others work until they complete it and bring the finished parts together. Crazy method for sure but the products sure are pretty and awesome.

Anyway Apple are very good at building products to use right out the box. So bam you can go. But when they do have to bring in Third Parties this case it's AMD they do end up running into problems. I also have an AMD Video card but I've built my computer because I hate out the box stuff and the limitations drives me crazy lol. I think if apple are able to make the awesome A5 chips in the iPhone and iPad they should be able to create and use their own graphics software and processors.

I believe nVidia is the graphics card you want for gaming so Apple should make models with nVidia inside, as they are simply the best but pricey. AMD do an amazing job for the price they put out though but it is more or less about matching up software, and hardware to work side by side it's tricky and if Apple keep the hardware dept and software dept away from eachother then it will be even more so.

I think it could be what you said the OpenGL with the OS, as that's what springs up in the JIRA but again not a Mac just giving my findings on the subject!

[Jo Yardley]

I don't know, I have a 4-5 year old macbook and it is working allright, with the firestorm viewer anyway.

Maybe I just don't know what SL is like for people with better computers, but I've survived so far.

But I am looking into getting a new PC laptop just for SL (keeping the old macbook for everything else).

[Luc Starsider]

Part of the problem is that, even if your iMac has a fairly good graphics card (I don't actually know if it is, but I assume so), it is still a Mobile version of the card. Which by itself makes it much less powerful than the desktop version of the card. (Again, I don't know that much about it, but this is my understanding of mobile vs. desktop versions of graphics cards.)

The only Mac that has - and can use - desktop graphics cards is the Mac Pro. Which has not been updated for quite a while, and comes with a hefty price tag.

- Luc -

[Deej Kasshiki]

The LL Mac client just flat out stinks. As much as I'd like to blame it on AMD/ATI's weak support for OpenGL in their graphics drivers I even have issues on my MacBook Pro that has an Nvidia graphics processor. Problems as in getting 10-15 fps less than when using somewhat equivalent Windows hardware and various graphical anomalies. I finally got tired of fighting and built myself a gaming PC for SL and other games.

I think the issue is more the fault of LL's questionable coding and AMD's questionable OpenGL support than Apple's.

[Loki Eliot]

It's probably a combination of the three, im going to boot into windows 7 and test out SL. Ive never done this before so it will be interesting to see how well SL runs on windows oon the same hardware

[Luc Starsider]

I'm curious to hear how it goes, so please come back and report.

- Luc -

[Loki Eliot]

Well, i'd say it was actually worst. The interesting thing is that in the statistics window SL said it was running at a faster FPS on windows, yet the whole thing seemed much more sluggish. Windows also could not display Depth of field properly.

So perhaps it is the graphics card that causes the most issues for LL to overcome. 

In that case what are the best performing Graphics cards for SL?

[Luc Starsider]

Funny to hear the experience you have using windows on the mac. I didn't expect that. When the fps are higher you wouldn't expect it to feel more sluggish.

The best performing graphics card? I'm not really sure to be honest. I know both nvidia and AMD make desktop cards which will do more than well. Shadows enabled the whole time with good fps. If I was to get a pc with a better graphics card, I would probably go for an nvidia GTX 580. That's probably not the correct name for it, but it's close enough, I think. The reason is that it does well in SL, but I'm also a Blender user - like you are - and I know from reading up on this that this is one of the better cards, if not the best, for rendering in Cycles in Blender.

AMD are improving their drivers, and Cycles might support AMD properly before long, so in a little while, I might change my mind. The newest, high performance AMD cards looks really tempting...

- Luc -

[Nalates Urriah]

There are some deep problems.

OpenGL runs very well on Windows. If you dig into OpenGL you will find that they are rather adamant about OpenGL running as well as DirectX/Direct3D. If you played in Blue Mars and ever looked at the FPS rate you saw their high-end graphics ran at great FPS rates. Several times what we see in SL.

OpenGL is an open source competitor of DirectX. The video card makers create DirectX and OpenGL drivers for their cards. These are the systems that provide API's to the game makers. This is where the problems start. In Windows there is a basic OpenGL driver or ICD (Installable Client Driver) named opengl32.dll (C:\Windows\System32\) which is written by Microsoft. Apple has an equivalent written by Apple.

These are usually designed for maximum hardware compatibility and as simple and basic as possible. All they mostly need to do is draw the Windows or Apple windows and get text and pictures on the screen. These files tend to use only the older OpenGL versions. However, they are supposed to check for 'newer' OpenGL drivers. So, they should find the nVidia or ATI OpenGL drivers that get installed with your video card.

Both the Windows and Apple graphics systems have to provide API's so OpenGL can reach the hardware. This gets complex because exposing the hardware allows mistakes to crash the computer, essentially breaking or confusing the kernel, core computing process of the operating system. In Windows the most direct-to-hardware API's are via Direct3D. I'm not sure what the Apple side is named.

Whew! So a game provides an ICD that accesses the system's ICD that hands it off to the video card maker's driver which accesses the system's graphics engine, Direct3D/DirectX on windows. That is overly simple... but you start to get the idea.

ATI and Apple have not put as much effort into OpenGL as nVidia and Windows has. The OS drivers and video card drivers are just not as good on the Apple side.

Linden Lab targets the larger user base and writes the OpenGL interface (ICD) for SL. They are optimizing for older hardware and then moving toward newer hardware. But they are walking a mine field. Problems in the nVidia driver or the Microsoft parts can cause problems. The same on the Apple side. We saw that with the Pink Textures problem that was caused by the Catalyst driver. We also saw nVidia problems that were also common in Battlefield, WoW, and other games. The JIRA's relating to those problems here in SL were marked 'Won't Fix' because it was a problem in the nVidia driver.

Because of the weak drivers on the Apple and ATI/AMD side the Lab has to create work-around fixes. They are not in the position to fix either Microsoft's or Apple's drivers or the card maker's drivers. The Lindens are limited in what they can fix. They also self impose which features in the various versions they will use. 

Things will get better. When is the question. The user and Linden time scales are radically different.

[Loki Eliot]

Thanks Nalates for an excellent explanation

 

One thing that often pops in to my non programmer head is the fact that i've played games like Assasins Creed, Rage,  Bioshock and other high graphics games that have incredible detail and lighting with shadows. It's easy then to ask why can my Mac render those games so smooth and fast yet SL is so sluggish rendering what might be described as basic scenary.

[Aveline Stein]

The thing about games usually running much much better than SL is because gamecreators work with a budget of how many polygons, textures etc they have available for each scene based on their minimum and recommended system specs.

Even after the fact that games are already build 'to spec', the completed scenes and game are heavily analyzed and optimized. Needless to say, that with big titles, even nVidia and ATI tweak their drivers to make those games run better on their cards.

SL really is getting none of that, plus it is lacking modern technologies that help to make it 'look good' while keeping things speedy. SL content in general is *very* heavy. It is quite likely that if you dumped your average SL scene + avatars into any of the big name game engines, it would grind those to a halt too.

[PeterCanessa Oh]

Talk tech some more cara mia

[Luc Starsider]

I agree with the others - Very good explanation, Nalates!

An added thing on the Apple side, is that you can't download updated drivers from the card makers. The only updates to the drivers are the ones Apple provides. Except in some cases, for some cards, where it's possible to download driver for nvidia cards directly from nvidia.

- Luc -

[Deej Kasshiki]

---

Nalates Urriah wrote:

 

ATI and Apple have not put as much effort into OpenGL as nVidia and Windows has. The OS drivers and video card drivers are just not as good on the Apple side.

---

This might come as a bit of a surprise to Apple and ATI both of whom sit on the OpenGL architecture board and were founding members of the OpenGL consortium along with IBM, Dell, Sun, Microsoft (who left the consortium to focus on their DirectX hegemony), Nvidia and Intel.

[Loki Eliot]

Why cant they all just get along :-p:matte-motes-inlove:

[Sharven Raabe]

I have use SL under both Windows and Mac OS X on my late 2009 27" iMac and not noticed any grave performance differences (even though I haven't been looking out for them either)...

As for the OpenGL implementation of Apple: I must leave it to Apple, that while the performance cannot keep up with the implementations by ATI and nVidia, the stability has been so  far outstanding. And they are making giant leaps forward; the last version, Snow Leopard, supported OpenGL 2.1; that's not even par with DirectX 9. The current version supports OpenGL 3.0, which is not quite the current state of the art, but it's a solid base to work from, comparable with DirectX 9. The upcoming version, Mountain Lion, supports OpenGL 4.1. That's a massive improvement in very short time. Of course the drivers do not have as much performance optimizations as nVidia's and ATI's drivers, but they are a lot more stable. nVidia and ATI both support OpenGL 4.5 afaik, and that for more than a year.

So, while I originally was very disappointed with Apples policy to create their own drivers from scratch instead of trying to work with the manufacturers to adopt existing drivers by the manufacturers. The consequence was naturally that the drivers in Mac OS X cannot only not keep up with Windows, but also not with Linux, which does use highly optimized state of the art OpenGL 4.5 drivers as well. However, Apple did provide a homogenous platform to all software developers and a stable environment to its users, which seems to have worked out despite all its shortcomings compared to the competition. And now that Apple is catching up, it looks like their somewhat headstrong path to more independance from the manufacturers and more immediate control of their graphics stack seems to slowly work out. Apple is not on the level of Windows and Linux, but it's getting there. With a system under their own immediate control.

I am just curious how Apple will handle those intel Chips. I don't have a Sandy Bridge Mac, but afaik,the on Chips intel HD 3000 have been ignored so far. Giving the massive scaling up on the new Ivy Bridge generation, the HD 4000 chips, that would be quite a waste. Especially the cheaper MacBook Pro and iMac models wouldn't really need an own graphics card anymore; if those chips were properly supported.

[Loki Eliot]

Well in the end Mountain Lion did not implament OpenGL4.1 which is no big deal for Mac SL users anyway because even though OSX Lion supports OpenGL 3.0 , the Second Life Viewer for mac only supports OpenGL2.1. So Apples behind the Current version of OpenGL by 2 years and Second Life is behind by 4. 

So why doesn't the Second Life viewer for Mac support 64bit or OpenGL3.0?

[Yanik Lytton]

I'm currently on Snow Leopard with a Mac Pro and ATI graphic card. SL viewer 3 is running quite fine with very rare crashes.

What if I upgrade to Mountain Lion? Does SL support it at all?

[Luc Starsider]

I've been on Mountain Lion since day one. My experience is that the SL viewer works the same it did on Snow Leopard. I haven't had any more or fewer crashes, or any other issues. AFAIK, Mountain Lion feels more stable and 'solid' generally than SnL did, but as far as viewers (LL viewer in my case) are concerned, it is pretty much the same.

- Luc -

[Carl Allegiere]

I switched over to Macbook Air and Mac Mini from Windows laptop and desktop about 6 months ago. The SL viewers running on Macs are horrible by comparison with Windows -- lag is awful. My guess is that the SL Mac viewers are not optimized for the new MacOS Lion and the drivers in these newest generation Macs.

[Theresa Tennyson]

---

Carl Allegiere wrote:

I switched over to Macbook Air and Mac Mini from Windows laptop and desktop about 6 months ago. The SL viewers running on Macs are horrible by comparison with Windows -- lag is awful. My guess is that the SL Mac viewers are not optimized for the new MacOS Lion and the drivers in these newest generation Macs.

---

 

The current MacBook Air relies on Intel HD 4000 graphics, which is good for things like streaming video but is very poor for calculating and displaying 3D objects, which is what you need for SL. Mac Minis are also pretty low-end for 3D graphics. I'm not saying that Macs are bad computers, but those two examples are designed for pretty specific requirements - i.e. extreme light weight and low power use for the MacBook Air - which require compromises that are the exact opposite of what you need for good performance with heavy 3D calculations.

[Trybil Timeless]

I just got a new Imac with Nvidia GT680MX graphics.  With everything maxed in a busy setting and max draw distance, I get about 7 fps running Firestorm on Mac, and about 25 fps running same everything in Windows bootcamp.  Huge difference.  I wouldn't reboot for 30% performance difference, but 300%?

[Qie Niangao]

Interesting that this old thread surfaces now, when there's light on the horizon if one is brave enough to try the Cocoa project viewer (from the alternate viewers download page). I don't use a Mac myself, but I've seen reports of night-and-day improvements in performance.