Would Second Life run on Macbook Pro smoothly?

[Alyvia0421]

Can SL run smoothly on them? If it can't, what viewers would be able to run it smoothly on a MB Pro? Also, what is the difference between using the SL official viewer and third-party viewers? 

[Madelaine McMasters]

Hi Alyvia,

SL is very demanding on the graphics hardware of any computer. All Macbook Pros, with the exception of the top of the line 15" model, do NOT have dedicated graphics processors. They rely on Intel's integrated graphics hardware, which is getting better but still is not in the same league as the dedicated chips. This problem is compounded by the fact that Macbook Pros all have retina displays (except for the very old non Retina 13" with optical drive that will vanish soon), which are gorgeous because they have 4x as many pixels as standard laptop displays. And that forces the graphics hardware to push around 4x as many pixels. Ooooh... and ouch!

You'll be able to run SL on Mid-to-High settings, and enable advanced lighting for photographic purposes, but you'll never get really zippy performance. The 13" Macbook Retina Pro was recently updated to Intel's newest chips, and the 15" units are about to be phased out for newer models. All of these newer models will have the nifty new force touch trackpad. I've tried it and it's neat, particularly when applications make use of the taptic feedback. If you're going to get a new Mac, get one with that trackpad.

I have a three year MacBook Air that runs SL okay on Low to Mid and 2.5 year old iMac that's pretty zippy on High because it's got a good dedicated graphics chip. Only my iMac is useable with shadows enabled. SL has never been very kind to Mac users and that's not going to change. Third party viewers use the same core code, so they're no better. The primary differences between viewers are in the user interface organization.

 

[Alyvia0421]

How would you be able to change the setting to mid-to-high? And what viewer has the most options?

[Madelaine McMasters]

In the Me (or Avatar, depending on the viewer) menu, you'll find "Preferences" and that has a "Graphics" panel. There's a slider for overall graphics quality that goes from Low to Ultra. Changing it changes a bunch of other settings, all of which are available in that preferences panel. There is a check box for "Advanced Lighting Model" there as well. Enabling it enables a bunch of other checkboxes as well, so you can enable various subsections of Advanced graphics to fine-tune performance.

 

All of the viewers have more-or-less the same graphics controls. The most popular SL viewers are probably Firestorm and the official SL Viewer.

 

You can find Firestorm here...

http://www.firestormviewer.org

 

And the official viewer is available through the "Download Second Life" link at the bottom of this web page.

[Alyvia0421]

Thanks! This was very helpful.