New Quad Core iMacs AMD Radeon HD 6970M with up to 2GB ram

[Loki Eliot]

I see Apple released New iMacs with Sandy Bridge quad core i5 processors with up to 16GB ram.

They can have AMD Radeon HD 6970M with up to 2GB of dedicated ram. Would SL even recognise this tech and use it? would 2GB of ram make any difference to the SL Viewer? the texture memory slider only goes up to 512mb so does buying a computer with a graphics card with over 1gb ram pointless for SL viewing?

[Void Singer]

SL won't utilize the extra graphics memory, but other open applications may benefit from the excess and run more smoothly

sidenote: WTF were they thinking with that processor name? Sandy Bridges get washed away by excessive surf lol

[Deej Kasshiki]

Heh, better ask Intel since they're Intel's chips and use Intel's code names. If I recall Intel names their chips after various cities and towns, so I guess there's town called Sandy Bridge somewhere.

It sounds a lot less threatening for the technophobic I guess. :smileywink:

[TriloByte Zanzibar]

The AMD (formerly ATI) Radeon HD 6570M/6770M/6970M in the new iMacs handle SL extremely well (all can handle ultra settings), and get really solid frame rates with SL.

By default, the Mac SL client can use half your machine's video memory, up to a max of 512MB (a hard-coded limit of the viewer), but as it was mentioned, the additional video memory would come in extremely handy when multi-tasking.  If you're involved in SL content creation, a 1GB machine means having Photoshop etc. open simultaneously and never having to worry about Viewer crashes.  If you go the extra mile and get the biggest of the iMacs with the 2GB video memory, you'll have smooth sailing even if you do fun/crazy stuff like big renders, or you run multiple instances of the SL Viewer.  

A good example of use would be shooting video.  Use an alt that you use for camera control, and then your avatar can run around in its own viewer instance, you can easily see what's going on both in the camera view and your avatar view... all while recording in iShowU or ScreenFlow, and with other tools like Photoshop or iMovie/Premiere Pro running in the background.

[Loki Eliot]

Awesome, Thanx Trilo, your words alone have convinced me the iMac is a better option than the Macbook Pro. I wanted a macbook because i used to take it with me to clients, but now i have an iPad which does a good job of showing clients work. So maybe this iMac will improve my Sl world I'd love to be able to film New Babbage again.

[TriloByte Zanzibar]

A lot of folks have been asking about SL and the new machines, so I took a few minutes to do a write-up - check it out here.

[TriloByte Zanzibar]

You should have no trouble at all filming good quality motion video in SL at 720p, or even 1080p on the 27-inch model.

[Christabella Bolissima]

This isn't about the iMacs but does have to do with using a Quad Core- I just bought a New HP Deskktop with a nice 20 in. flat Screen Monitor.  I had seen that Second Life under their specs page didn't know if a Quad Core Processor would work in Second Life because they have not tested one as of yet.  Well I want Second Life to know that the HP Desktop with Windows 7 I just purchased has a AMD Athlon II Quad-Core Processor and I am using 64 Bit Performance with 6 GB DDR3 System Memory, with 1 Terabyte of Hard Drive.  So anyone out there wondering if a Quad-Core works in SL- the answer is yes.

[RobbyBoy Daxter]

Thank you so much! This came in so handy. Looking forward to my iMac and SL together.

[Loki Eliot]

Well ive ordered the New iMac, and ill do a proper video next week showing How SL performs on it for me.

[Avariel Falcon]

We will look forward to seeing your new movies now you have a shiny new iMac. Particularly if you can shoot in New-Babbage again.

[Loki Eliot]

OK here is a video of my iMac in action with SL Viewer 2

Before today i would have to speed the video UP x2 to get the sort of film i've just recorded, so its a fast improvment (which is only to be expected really).

Click the video to enlarge it so you can see the Stats bar in HD.

At the time of publishing it's audio swapping so some of you might not be able to see it yet. 

Shadows and Depth are not yet supported and you can get quite a bit of performance difference from turning on and off OpenGL VBO.

[Avariel Falcon]

Very impressive!

Looks like that VBO setting makes a huge difference, particularly in our sooty steam city.

It's got to look amazing on that 27" IPS display!

[Loki Eliot]

ok this is my last post on this topic. The Minions working on Viewer2 have just made some leaps in improving mac support leaving me very cheerful and confident that ill be able to view and film some amazing things very soon.

Below is a video of Shadows and Depth working on Escapades Island in Cutterstone path. As soon as i get more money ill be grabbing some extra ram to up from 4GB to 16GB and will see if that helps.

This was taken using the latest MESH developer build