New ultra thin iMacs are out - post here!

[Loki Eliot]

The New iMacs 21" are out in the stores, with 27" on preorder for delivery 3 weeks away. Anyone ran out and bought one yet so we can know wether there is any issues with the current SL Viewer? 

The 21" uses NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M & GT 650M graphics cards. As i wait for the 27" to be released would be interesting to hear from new 21" owners.

[Orca Flotta]

Of course it will run SL, probably even satisfactory if you don't wanna play on ultra graphics. The GT series are no high end cards but will do the job somehow. So far so good, now the negative side of Macs you probably know in and out so I'm gonna shut up.

[Chris Frentis]

I love  Macs and cant wait to get one of those.  I killed my Pc years ago using 3d programs while learning tosculpts for SL. I replaced it with a 27" iMac in 2010 and the whole experience is beautifullly simple and low mainatinence and it has been going great since.

 

Reccomend macs to your friends and PC's to people you want to charge by the hour!

[Loki Eliot]

Yeh well, i know all about the fact SL only supports openGL 2.1 for mac, and only supports 256mb texture memory, but sometimes it's the little extra things that can boost performance. But sometimes there will be something that can break SL, it has happened before so there is always that worry. 

Im pretty sure SL will run quite well.

[Brigid Yoshikawa]

Hey all! I thought I would post some info since I know I had a hard time finding any feedback on the new iMacs and SL when I was looking recently. Yesterday I bought the $1499.00 21.5 iMac with the 650m graphics card. I was really worried that the card would not give me the settings boost I was hoping for. My old machine could only run SL at lower settings with no shadows or other goodies, and I really had my fingers crossed that this machine would do the job. For this reason I opted for the upgraded 21.5 machine because I read somewhere that the 650m has a 25% advantage over the 640m card. The verdict? IT IS AWESOME! And how! I'm using the SL viewer and I've got the settings MAXED (I was able to run depth of field - but chose to turn it off because I don't like it). I've got shadows!!!! There has been very little lag. The only noticable and mildly irritating lag was at the Relay for Life winter build which is a pretty big, busy, blinky glowy resource draining build so that is understandable.

Hope this helps someone!

[Loki Eliot]

Thats awesome news im getting my iMac on monday will post my results on tuesday

[Loki Eliot]

Well resaults are in and while everything esle is much zippyer thanx to the 3.4 GHz Intel Dual Core i7 with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX 2048 MB... SL appears not to have benefited much from it. I need to sit down and do some proper testing, but so far there is a mightly boost with regular settings (no shadows).

Turning on Shadows seems to handicap SL with no real difference in performance between my old AMD iMac and this new GeForce iMac, and its noticibly slower than a windows PC. Perhaps this is where the difference in OpenGL support comes into play. (Mac SL Viewer only supports up to OpenGL2.1)

Cache seems to load faster which i assume is the benefits of the Flash Harddrive. 

I have a few issues with textures loading and that might be my connection & iSP, so i need to look into that, but it also might be due to changed LL are doing to the server code and cacheing as part of the Shining Project, so gotta keep an eye on that too.

SL performance is a hooby in itself!

UPDATE - While the Official SL viewer reorganises Default Graphics settings based on updated Card Compatability List i noticed this release note - "MAINT-2090 Never enable lighting and shadows by default on OS X" suggesting there is a regognised issue with Shadows for Mac... again...