Mac Performance for Second Life

[melt Mills]

I am considering buying a new computer and have looked at the new iMac. I have never had an apple computer before and was wondering if anyone could tell me how they go with second life. Or does anyone have any suggestions for something better?

[Gavin Hird]

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melt Mills wrote:

I am considering buying a new computer and have looked at the new iMac. I have never had an apple computer before and was wondering if anyone could tell me how they go with second life. Or does anyone have any suggestions for something better?

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When you say the new iMac, do you mean the 5k machine? Although this has the most "hefty" GPU before going to a Mac Pro, keep in mind that it has a 5k screen to haul around and runngin the SL viewer in this will probalby be sub-optimal.

If I recall right arstechnica.com have tested the 5k Mac for gaming purposes and concluded it performs quite good, but if you halve the screen resolution to one of the 27" iMac standard resolutions performance suffers. 

I am running the SL and Kokua viever on and iMac 27" with the 660M processor and 512 Mb GPU memory.  As long as you don't try and run in Ultra mode, it runs pretty decent even with shadows and AO turned on. 

[Daniel Regenbogen]

Personally I think the 27inch Retina iMac is overrated, and as Gavin already said, it has a huge amount of Pixels to push around by the graphic card, and that graphic card is from AMD which usually isn't as suited for SL like an Nvidia card. A Mac in general doen't perform as well in SL as a Windows machine with the same technical data (it is crazy, installing Windows via Bootcamp on a Mac you get a much better performance than under MacOS). That's why you should always grab the Mac with the best hardware (at least on the graphic card side), which would make the 27inch Retina iMac madly expensive.

 

On the other hand even the non-retina 27inch iMac Display is beautiful. Sadly these iMacs nowadays only come with the Nvidia GT 755M graphic card, there is no option for a better one available anymore. If you want a 27inch iMac, look in the refurbished section of the Apple Store and grab one with at least the Nivida GTX 775M (2GB graphic memory) or if you are lucky with a Nvidia GTX 780M (4GB graphic memory). I use that model at the moment, and so far I wasn't tempted to install Windows on it :-)