New Apple Silicon

[Tom00062]

Yes I use Firestorm on one of the new MBP and it works with zero issues. Super fast too with frame rates between 60 and 120. 

[KjartanEno]

3 hours ago, Tom00062 said:

Yes I use Firestorm on one of the new MBP and it works with zero issues. Super fast too with frame rates between 60 and 120. 

Citing a framerate is irrelevant without specifics like viewer resolution, shadows on or off, ambient occlusion, LOD factor, water reflection level, time of day (midday is preferred for repeatable benchmarks), draw distance, EEP or Windlight, a landmark in a public sim for others to use as a reference, the number of avatars (if any) in the view (preferably none), and an image of what you're seeing with that framerate. Using a graphics preset isn't good enough since settings can be tweaked beyond setting a preset such as "high."

It's extremely easy to get over 120 fps with my cheap home built computer, a quad core Ryzen 3 1300x, 16 GB DDR4 RAM, and RX 580 8GB GPU running Linux, with shadows off in a skybox, for example. Give us a location, settings, and an image to use as a guide. Don't get me wrong, I'm quite interested in the M1 chip (or more accurately succeeding generations of ARM chips that run desktop operating systems) for the energy efficiency and computing power. I am not interested in meaningless framerate citations.

[Tom00062]

The question I was responding to was if the Firestorm viewer would run on the M1 Chip. I was simply stating that it does and does it very well.. It was not intended to be a detailed benchmark of the chip and how it performs in different settings and situations ! 

[Ona Waffle]

On 11/27/2020 at 2:07 PM, uk89201 said:

Okay, a slightly odd side question then  What are you using for camera control (just keyboard, trackpad?) - reason I ask is that I see from SecondLife JIRA that MacOS Big Sur has stopped the 3dconnexion space mouse from working with LL Viewer/FireStorm. Holding off upgrading to Big Sur on my iMac until that's - hopefully - sorted. If I could buy this laptop with Catalina it would be perfect!

My 3dspace navigator still work on my intel iMac under big sure. but...some functions have changed and I had to disable my hot corner  screen saver and sometimes the drop down menu gets activated when I cam around.

[Gabryel Nyoki]

I have a current 16'' MacBook Pro with Radeon 5600 8Gb 2048bits GPU (Intel), When I boot on windows (bootcamp) and lower the resolution to 1920x1080 it 's crazy. it can goto over 200fps in light places like skyboxes. Now my question is, Rosetta 2? can I get that with the upcoming M1X Macbook pro? wat is the max you ever got with the M1? in FPS? no matter what is ahead of you? try the emptiest place...

If it can, then the m1x might be a beast for SL!

[KjartanEno]

12 hours ago, Gabryel Nyoki said:

I have a current 16'' MacBook Pro with Radeon 5600 8Gb 2048bits GPU (Intel), When I boot on windows (bootcamp) and lower the resolution to 1920x1080 it 's crazy. it can goto over 200fps in light places like skyboxes. Now my question is, Rosetta 2? can I get that with the upcoming M1X Macbook pro? wat is the max you ever got with the M1? in FPS? no matter what is ahead of you? try the emptiest place...

If it can, then the m1x might be a beast for SL!

You might want to read Lyssa's helpful post earlier in the thread. In reality, it's not as important what the maximum framerate can be, but how well heavy loads are handled. The M1 is indeed very impressive for general use computing. I'd consider simply being able to use SL as a side bonus for this generation of new Macs. In a couple of generations (M3+GPU?), they may actually compete with high end PCs in performance in SL.

[KjartanEno]

On 12/1/2020 at 8:11 PM, Lyssa Greymoon said:

I was getting decent performance with ALM on and 128M draw distance in both the Linden viewer and Firestorm (full screen). No shadows and minimum water reflections. In Chakryn forest they both do the mid-20s. Everwinter Nights ranged from 20-ish and down to the teens. Acceptable, but not great. Single digits at Moochie's Winter Wonderland, but that place is brutal on everything. Ultra is a no-go. Switching to Ultra in Chakryn Forest dragged the frame rate straight to single digit hell.

That's a very helpful observation. I was curious to see what my decent-but-far-from-high-end computer does in Chakryn. This is a screenshot of the view I cammed, showing the viewer, framerate, and settings used. The Ryzen 3 1300x in my computer has four cores, no hyperthreading, single core boost to 3.7GHz, and all cores max of ~3.5GHz. The RX 580 8GB video card is basically an overclocked RX 480, which AMD released in the Spring of 2016 (soon to be 5 year old technology). I run Ubuntu 20.04, a secure and free open source operating system.

What the M1 needs is a viewer that is compiled from source to benefit from its strengths, and perhaps LL is working on it. Alternately, one could wait for Apple to release an M1 (or M2) chip with a separate GPU, but don't expect it to cost ~$800 like the entry level Mini. That said, I would surely hope nobody is buying these new M1 Macs mainly for Second Life since that would be an incredible waste of money considering how poorly they compare to decent-but-far-less-expensive computers.

 

Edit: I tried out Cool VL Viewer in Windlight mode. Henri might be pleased to hear me admit that his viewer surpassed Firestorm in this case, getting 40 fps with advanced lighting enabled, ambient occlusion enabled, shadows off, and 128m draw distance.

Edited December 15, 2020 by KjartanEno
additional info

[Pgr3123 Romano]

On 11/10/2020 at 7:52 PM, Tom00062 said:

Does anyone know if SL will run on the new Apple MacBooks ? 

Yea I have a MacBook Pro m1 and sorry second life don’t runs well. Still unplayable .. less then 10 FPS with all graphics down and window under hd.

[Pgr3123 Romano]

On 12/11/2020 at 5:41 PM, Tom00062 said:

Yes I use Firestorm on one of the new MBP and it works with zero issues. Super fast too with frame rates between 60 and 120. 

Impossible. I have MacBook Pro m1. I am about 10 FPS with all graphics down.

[Tom00062]

I have to disagree - and I suspect you must have something else going on with your setup ... I have graphic settings on high and I am getting really good frame rates on most sims that I visit. Usually well in excess of 50 FPS depending on the sim I am at.

[Pgr3123 Romano]

please explain me why? I did a new installation of sl (both sl viewer and firestorm) , I have a MacBook Pro m1 13 inch and also with low settings the game is unplayable (probably run under rosetta with both viewers). With the same internet connection with my desktop pc sl runs very smooth

[Tom00062]

I can't explain why. All I can say that I got a new MacBook Pro m1 13 inch and installed firestorm only on it and it runs amazingly well on high settings. I have compared this to a 5 year old 12 inch MacBook that I was using and its like night and day ! I have been very impressed with how it is able to run Second Life.

[Theresa Tennyson]

54 minutes ago, Pgr3123 Romano said:

please explain me why? I did a new installation of sl (both sl viewer and firestorm) , I have a MacBook Pro m1 13 inch and also with low settings the game is unplayable (probably run under rosetta with both viewers). With the same internet connection with my desktop pc sl runs very smooth

With some modern hardware viewers run worse on low settings than high settings because low settings don't use features that later hardware is designed to use.

[Pgr3123 Romano]

I used also high setting and is a lot worse then low settings.

[Lyssa Greymoon]

In advanced graphics settings uncheck Enable Support for HiDPI displays.

[Pgr3123 Romano]

my firestorm version is 6.4.12.62831. Really can't understand how in your case the program is smooth because I am really far from a good result. I think with high settings and low resolution I don't have more than 10 fps.

[KjartanEno]

2 minutes ago, Tom00062 said:

I can't explain why. All I can say that I got a new MacBook Pro m1 13 inch and installed firestorm only on it and it runs amazingly well on high settings. I have compared this to a 5 year old 12 inch MacBook that I was using and its like night and day ! I have been very impressed with how it is able to run Second Life.

On the Menu, click "Help" and then "About Firestorm." A window pops up. Open Preferences and click the graphics tab while you're in one of these places that gives you great framerates. Then take a screenshot so everyone can see what settings you use, like in my picture below. By doing so, you will help any MBP M1 users and prospective buyers to have confidence that it is indeed capable of running as well as you've said.

[Tom00062]

[DavinaUK]

On 12/21/2020 at 3:12 PM, Tom00062 said:

I'm not sure how useful this will be but I run a MacBook Pro 15" (a couple of years old now) and thought it might be interesting to show my results when graphics are set to those Tom is using, my frame rate was very poor despite being in my skybox with very little in it, I get around 12fps. Hi-dpi is switched off and anti-aliasing is set to 2x. On the Mac settings side of things I have the screen resolution set to the default for my built in display.

I should also say that Tom isn't using advanced lighting which I usually do, though to compensate I drop my draw distance to 32m, turn on Avatar cloth and drop shadows, water reflections and point lighting to the lowest setting. Tom it would be interesting to see how the M1 runs with advanced lighting turned on. One of the problems with MacBooks running on Intel processors is thermal throttling and my frame rate jumps around a lot making a direct comparison difficult. I'd say that I average around 12fps but I jump between 6 and 20 all the time especially when switching apps. From what I've read thermal throttling in SL isn't an issue on the M1 Macs.

Not trying to hijack the thread but does anyone know if it would be possible to compile a viewer that uses Metal in place of OpenGL? It's not my area of expertise but given that OpenGL is deprecated in MacOS and Metal is a framework built from OpenGL to replace it (correct me if my understanding is incorrect here) would a metal graphics engine solve some of the performance issues Mac users seem to get, especially now that M1's aren't thermal throttling the way Intel chips have been?

[Pauck]

I got a M1 MacBook Air with 7 core GPU and 16gb RAM, even that I am aware it may not be the ideal laptop for Second Life. I'm surprised it can run the official viewer with decent FPS, at least for me, with ALM on. In Bellisseria I got an average of 20 FPS and on Mainland 30 FPS. I was worried about this MacBook getting too hot but it feels just warm to the touch and as soon I close the viewer it cools down. 

Previously I used a 2015 MacBook Pro where if I turn on ALM I couldn't move at all, I used similar settings except for ALM and local lights.

This are my settings and what I got in Chakryn Forest using the LL Viewer (Second Life Release 6.4.12.553798 (64bit)😞 

[KjartanEno]

On 12/23/2020 at 10:23 AM, DavinaUK said:

Not trying to hijack the thread but does anyone know if it would be possible to compile a viewer that uses Metal in place of OpenGL? It's not my area of expertise but given that OpenGL is deprecated in MacOS and Metal is a framework built from OpenGL to replace it (correct me if my understanding is incorrect here) would a metal graphics engine solve some of the performance issues Mac users seem to get, especially now that M1's aren't thermal throttling the way Intel chips have been?

As far as I can tell, the rendering engine would need a complete rebuild, which is no easy task. The current Second Life render engine runs on a single thread, which means that the CPU frequency and IPC (Instructions Per Clock cycle) become a bottleneck even for very powerful graphics cards. Your Intel iMac running at 2.3 GHz may be excellent for multi-threaded programs, but it's going to be a drag for Second Life even if you had it paired up with a decent graphics card. I'm going to guess that the M1 chip running at 2.4 GHz is also being very limited by the single thread rendering process that the Second Life viewers use. While the emulation being used is excellent, it can't perform miracles with the code it is given. As long as the Macs prioritize low frequency CPUs for power efficiency, no current Second Life viewer will run as well as it can on a desktop computer with a high frequency Intel or AMD CPU using a dedicated graphics card (and the power consumption and noise that goes along with it). To be completely frank, if one spends hundreds of hours in Second Life every year, why not invest in a computer that can really run it well? Save the Mac for other things you want to do.

Edited January 13, 2021 by KjartanEno
formatting

[Gavin Hird]

On 12/23/2020 at 5:23 PM, DavinaUK said:

Not trying to hijack the thread but does anyone know if it would be possible to compile a viewer that uses Metal in place of OpenGL? It's not my area of expertise but given that OpenGL is deprecated in MacOS and Metal is a framework built from OpenGL to replace it (correct me if my understanding is incorrect here) would a metal graphics engine solve some of the performance issues Mac users seem to get, especially now that M1's aren't thermal throttling the way Intel chips have been?

Apple has deprecated OpenGL and it will most likely be zapped completely from macOS the day they ship their latest Intel based Macs. From then on it is Metal only both on Intel and Apple Silicon. They have said the transition from Intel will be max 2 years, but if could be faster. We are soon 6 months into the transition period. 

The consequence of that is that the Mac viewer must be rewritten from scratch because the Metal libraries ONLY work with Objective-C or Swift, and 99.99% of the viewer code is C++. In addition to OpenGL that is used both to generate the entire user interface and render the world. 

This is a monumental undertaking. Unfortunately I don't see any project to move the Mac viewer forward and give it a future. 

[DavinaUK]

Thanks for your insights everyone. I ended up trading in my i9 MacBook Pro for a Mac Mini as I don't need to travel as part of my new job so a desktop is fine now but I also only have a small desk for a computer. Even if I had the space I wouldn't want to buy another PC with higher base clock speeds just for Secondlife  (no matter whether I spend hundreds of hours on SL or not, it's only one application) and for games I have a PS4 Pro, though I rarely get time to use it.

First impressions mirror what others have reported that it performs better than the Intel machine with dedicated graphics that replaced it, but as pointed out that is likely because the base clock speed is higher. @Pauck I haven't heard the fans on the Mac Mini firing up even once since I got it almost a week ago so I wouldn't worry about heat, in fact tests I've seen online show that the MacBook Air only had to throttle down during really taxing and long tests and even then it didn't slow down too aggressively.

I mirrored Pauck's location and settings in Firestorm and at first was getting 18.5fps but it rose to 19.7fps and settled there after I'd rezzed in. I checked Geekbench and the M1 scores a lot higher on single core performance than my old intel chip which may be why it performs better, though multi core was also higher too. And it does all this using so much less wattage, which is quite impressive.

I saw a report today (the video wasn't dated today but it was recent), that the MacMini did at least for a time become the best selling desktop in Japan which is quite an achievement considering the Mac's small PC market share. It's probably not the highest selling in Japan anymore but I've also seen that Microsoft have picked up interest in developing Windows 10 for ARM a lot more as they have ARM powered Surface's so perhaps ARM might actually catch on beyond the Mac line up.

But if LL/Firestorm/whoever else don't make a version of their viewer compiled for Apple silicon then at least emulation isn't proving to be such a huge bottleneck, but we can only see this new systems potential if this happens. Who knows, maybe if they do decide to invest time in developing an ARM client it could be ported over to iOS/iPadOS much more easily (let me dream, even though deep down I know its unlikely :) ). As for the metal/opengl discussion, we'll have to see what happens, perhaps OpenGL on Mac will simply remain in its current form and just not get development (something they haven't developed for a while anyway).

I hate to shill for a company but I trialled a product called Shadow Tech a while ago with Secondlife, there are no doubt other options out there that provide the same service. You basically rent a high spec remote server that you can install applications onto and access it via a client that streams the screen of the machine to you. The performance was great but it came at a monthly subscription cost of course, but for people who don't want a huge power hungry and noisy box in their house it could be a way to go as the client side requirements were minimal, though you need a decent internet connection. You also don't have to worry about upgrades either (or to be less charitable you have no option to upgrade) as its not your machine, they maintain it and you pay them for the privilege. It's not something I want to do but others may find it a compelling option.

[KjartanEno]

51 minutes ago, DavinaUK said:

I hate to shill for a company but I trialled a product called Shadow Tech a while ago with Secondlife, there are no doubt other options out there that provide the same service. You basically rent a high spec remote server that you can install applications onto and access it via a client that streams the screen of the machine to you. The performance was great but it came at a monthly subscription cost of course, but for people who don't want a huge power hungry and noisy box in their house it could be a way to go as the client side requirements were minimal, though you need a decent internet connection. You also don't have to worry about upgrades either (or to be less charitable you have no option to upgrade) as its not your machine, they maintain it and you pay them for the privilege. It's not something I want to do but others may find it a compelling option.

Google Stadia streams games to a browser, so it would make perfect sense that similar technology could exist for other applications. The thought had crossed my mind about LL providing this kind of streaming service for premium customers. Would they do it? I think the infrastructure investment would be fairly high, adding another layer of complexity to the system. Would people pay for it?

[Alise Morningstar]

On 12/21/2020 at 1:10 PM, Pgr3123 Romano said:

my firestorm version is 6.4.12.62831. Really can't understand how in your case the program is smooth because I am really far from a good result. I think with high settings and low resolution I don't have more than 10 fps.

Hi Pgr3123 Romano,

I can understand your skepticism. I had really terrible frame rates on my MBP M1, even with the quality turned right down to minimum. I then tried some of the locations the guys in this post are showing, and I get the 30-50 fps they claim. It depends hugely on what is in the region. My home in Belissima is terrible, presumably due to loads of stuff in my house, the trees outside etc. However, I can easily get 60-70 fps in my Skybox, and 20-30 fps in my mainland preferred haunts. It really comes down to having to tune your settings for your location, not one-size-fits-all. Biggest factor is definitely draw distance. If you can cope with a short draw distance, you should get some pretty good frame rates.

Generally, I'm pretty impressed with SL on the M1 MBP having upgraded from a pretty old MBA, but like others would welcome a native build. I guess it's early days yet.

Cheers,

Alise