MBP M1 Pro (Mac)

[Zaddy Quack]

Has anyone tried the new M1 Pro with SL yet? Curious... I'd like to consolidate my work, personal, and SL computer into 1. 

[Ramen Jedburgh]

Is there a client that works on the M1 Macs?  They changed the basic architecture to arm or something didn't they?  Doesn't that break a lot of older software?

[Madelaine McMasters]

Apple runs x86 code via their Rosetta emulator. People have been running SL viewers on the base M1 laptops since last year...

I've no idea how much speed increase will come from the new M1 Pro/Max machines, as SL doesn't make good use of multiple CPU cores, and the new machines have more high performance cores. That should allow SL to run better alongside other apps, though.

Edited October 28, 2021 by Madelaine McMasters

[Lyssa Greymoon]

3 hours ago, Ramen Jedburgh said:

Is there a client that works on the M1 Macs?  They changed the basic architecture to arm or something didn't they?  Doesn't that break a lot of older software?

No, what broke a lot of stuff was macOS Catalina a year earlier when Apple finally cut off support for 32-bit applications. The platform switch to ARM didn't break much at all, and software runs better than it did on comparable Intel Macs.

[Trinity Blakewell]

Firestorm was running great for me on my M1 MacBook Air till the MacOS update a few weeks ago. Just did the latest OS update, so I'll see if I am still having issues. Basically, much of the gains I had seen with M1 seemed to have gone away!

[Tara Rojyo]

I just got my 14" MBP M1Pro base and got firestorm running... while it runs better then on my older M1 MBP 13" my 5 year old Windows computer will still run circles around it without even getting warm.

Until LL decides to do a native client with Metal support I do not think SL will ever really run "great" on Mac OS.   However when I say "great" I do it while comparing it to my gaming rigs... so maybe it does run good compared to a on-chip GPU for windows *shrugs*

At my SL house on med-high (half way between the two), 128m view and advanced lighting enabled I am getting 32 FPS, on my gaming rig at the same location at Ultra settings and 256m veiw I can get 75FPS. 

Edited October 29, 2021 by Tara Rojyo

[Trinity Blakewell]

Never mind on my issue. Figured out that Firestorm and likely all SL viewers doesn't like the cache being on another drive, even a solid state one. I'm back to the performance levels I was seeing before.

Edited October 29, 2021 by Trinity1776

[Tara Rojyo]

Weird I run SL (Firestorm) on OS M.2 SSD (primary) and the cache on my Game Data M.2 SSD (2 of 4 SSD's) and have not seen a noticeable performance impact but I think I will run some tests and see

[MarissaOrloff]

On 10/28/2021 at 9:59 PM, Tara Rojyo said:

Until LL decides to do a native client with Metal support I do not think SL will ever really run "great" on Mac OS.   However when I say "great" I do it while comparing it to my gaming rigs... so maybe it does run good compared to a on-chip GPU for windows *shrugs*

They will never do that. Most likely for Macs MoltenVK will be used to map Vulkan to Metal.

[MarissaOrloff]

22 hours ago, Trinity1776 said:

Never mind on my issue. Figured out that Firestorm and likely all SL viewers doesn't like the cache being on another drive, even a solid state one. I'm back to the performance levels I was seeing before.

You can put the cache anywhere and it will not make a difference unless you are putting it on a slower disk (i.e. You have a sata ssd or nvme primary disk and you moved your cache to a 5400rpm mechanical disk). For best results with cache use a ramdisk but beware a ramdisk will delete the contents after each boot (since it uses ram) so you would have to reload your cache unless you instruct the ramdisk to save to a file then reload from that file on startup.

[Tara Rojyo]

15 hours ago, MarissaOrloff said:

They will never do that. Most likely for Macs MoltenVK will be used to map Vulkan to Metal.

Why would they insist on using one Vulkan to map to Metal instead of JUST doing Metal in the first place.   Everyone knows that once you start adding "middle man" into programming it just slows things down.  Unless you are implying they do not see any reason to care about SL on Mac, I am sure the user base cannot be that big. 

[MarissaOrloff]

4 minutes ago, Tara Rojyo said:

Why would they insist on using one Vulkan to map to Metal instead of JUST doing Metal in the first place.   Everyone knows that once you start adding "middle man" into programming it just slows things down.  Unless you are implying they do not see any reason to care about SL on Mac, I am sure the user base cannot be that big. 

It's not cost effective. Why double your costs writing two engines for just a fraction of the residents? It's much easier and cost effective to maintain one code base. Even "if" they did a separate Metal version it would just be a port of the Vulkan Windows version so you have a translation anyways. However, Vulkan performs quite well on Macs. Not as good as Windows and Linux but almost as good. I have a 6 yr old iMac as well I use from time to time and it sucks. Maybe Apple will get their head out of their ass and officially support Vulkan someday. Till then, MoltenVK is the way to go.

[Tara Rojyo]

15 hours ago, MarissaOrloff said:

It's not cost effective. Why double your costs writing two engines for just a fraction of the residents? It's much easier and cost effective to maintain one code base. Even "if" they did a separate Metal version it would just be a port of the Vulkan Windows version so you have a translation anyways. However, Vulkan performs quite well on Macs. Not as good as Windows and Linux but almost as good. I have a 6 yr old iMac as well I use from time to time and it sucks. Maybe Apple will get their head out of their ass and officially support Vulkan someday. Till then, MoltenVK is the way to go.

Yeah figured it was just a numbers game.. ROI just not there.  However I still blame LL not Apple on this, LL has more to lose in client experience than Apple does.  A lot of companies have invested to building native apps for Apple so there is a market.  

[anitabush]

18 hours ago, Tara Rojyo said:

Yeah figured it was just a numbers game.. ROI just not there.  However I still blame LL not Apple on this, LL has more to lose in client experience than Apple does.  A lot of companies have invested to building native apps for Apple so there is a market.  

Converting to metal would be worthwhile for an iPad client in my opinion. If it’s just for macs then vulkan makes more sense but that ignores the huge potential market for people accessing SL on iPads.
 

[Lyssa Greymoon]

It's been a year since the M1 Macs were released and there's still no sign of a universal binary viewer. When the Intel Macs were released in January '06 there was a viewer in March. At this point I think when something major breaks, that's the end of Mac support for SL.

Edited November 1, 2021 by Lyssa Greymoon

[Tara Rojyo]

I have to agree with you Lyssa, it seems the only reason they still have a Mac client at all currently is because they do not have to put any real work into it.  However it is a real shame when a 8 year old Windows 7 computer can out perform a state-of-art brand new 10 core Mac when you can run current AAA games at above 60 FPS because they made the decision to support Metal (Of maybe MoltenVK). 

I thought one of the big reasons for moving SL to the cloud was for a web viewer based client that would work on any platform as long as you had a broadband connection?  

[Tara Rojyo]

9 hours ago, anitabush said:

Converting to metal would be worthwhile for an iPad client in my opinion. If it’s just for macs then vulkan makes more sense but that ignores the huge potential market for people accessing SL on iPads.
 

Well if they are going to do Metal for iPad then it would be extremely minor to port that to Mac now that both use the same chips it would just be screen res as the difference.   The only thing stopping ANY iPad app from working on the new M1x Macs is the devs of the app turning a switch to allow it to. 

[MarissaOrloff]

16 hours ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

At this point I think when something major breaks, that's the end of Mac support for SL.

Mac support is not going away!

[MarissaOrloff]

10 hours ago, Tara Rojyo said:

I have to agree with you Lyssa, it seems the only reason they still have a Mac client at all currently is because they do not have to put any real work into it.  However it is a real shame when a 8 year old Windows 7 computer can out perform a state-of-art brand new 10 core Mac when you can run current AAA games at above 60 FPS because they made the decision to support Metal (Of maybe MoltenVK). 

I thought one of the big reasons for moving SL to the cloud was for a web viewer based client that would work on any platform as long as you had a broadband connection?  

Gaming has never been a focus for Apple. It has always taken a back seat with the exception to iOS where they take a 30% cut of all sales. Their focus is on media content creation. That is where they shine. Maybe as they improve their Arm SoC's things will get better but as of right now they are many many years behind NVIDIA and AMD. 

As far as for the "cloud" all LL did was move their data center from being self hosted in Arizona to being hosted by Amazon Web Services. That doesn't change they way any client will function. 

[anitabush]

12 hours ago, Tara Rojyo said:

Well if they are going to do Metal for iPad then it would be extremely minor to port that to Mac now that both use the same chips it would just be screen res as the difference.   The only thing stopping ANY iPad app from working on the new M1x Macs is the devs of the app turning a switch to allow it to. 

Exactly. I wish apple supported vulkan properly or made metal an open standard but we are where we are and while that Mac market share is small, the iPad and iPhone market share is huge. I hope the mac benefits from that more now the architecture is the same.

[Modulated]

They should be focusing their efforts squarely at getting the Windows client on a stable footing with Vulkan. Vulkan is cross-platform, Metal is not. To focus on such a small user base with Metal would be a complete waste of resources IMO.  Linux was already officially dropped by the Lab some time ago, can't see why they are wasting time on Apple at this point. It's time for them to refocus on the majority of users, which use Windows.

[Tara Rojyo]

9 hours ago, Modulated said:

They should be focusing their efforts squarely at getting the Windows client on a stable footing with Vulkan. Vulkan is cross-platform, Metal is not. To focus on such a small user base with Metal would be a complete waste of resources IMO.  Linux was already officially dropped by the Lab some time ago, can't see why they are wasting time on Apple at this point. It's time for them to refocus on the majority of users, which use Windows.

I think you greatly underestimate how big of a potential user base is if they simply supported Metal.  This step would instantly make SL native on every single iPad and iPhone (lets just forget Mac for a minute).  If they were able to even get a fraction of those users to play Second Life, iPhone is one of the most popular gaming hand-held systems... ever, it would dwarf the current user base.   IF they were worried about growing SL they would do that, if they are not then they will not.  

What they really need to do, is stop focusing on system based clients and just move completely to the cloud for streaming.  I have used Stadia, Luna, Geforce Now, and Xbox cloud gaming and they all work really good.   This would get rid of any limitations on the client side and move it all to the server side... which might just make LL finally make SL more efficient, updated, and get rid of way outdated legacy stuff. 

[Tara Rojyo]

12 hours ago, MarissaOrloff said:

Gaming has never been a focus for Apple. It has always taken a back seat with the exception to iOS where they take a 30% cut of all sales. Their focus is on media content creation. That is where they shine. Maybe as they improve their Arm SoC's things will get better but as of right now they are many many years behind NVIDIA and AMD. 

As far as for the "cloud" all LL did was move their data center from being self hosted in Arizona to being hosted by Amazon Web Services. That doesn't change they way any client will function. 

Yeah, not really "cloud" that is just using AWS for server on-demand scalability.. which is good but not "cloud".   

Well, their focus on media content creation took a back seat starting 2016 also, but they are trying to take that back.  If Apple can see a profit in gaming, which there is a HUGE profit to be had, it will get into gaming. The difference between Apple gaming on iPhone/iPad and gaming on Mac... is Apple has the former locked down so they can charge whatever they want but Mac is open, currently, so they are not in the same garden.  

The M1Pro 10/16 core actually plays ALL my current AAA games that can play on Mac and at decent FPS.  I do not know much about Vulkan but if that is universal and be implimented on Mac Os that would be cool.  I run GR BP in Vulkan and is butter smooth on my gaming rig (32GB, RTX 3070 8GB FTW, AMD Ryzen 7).  The games I have been able to get running on Mac OS (without parallels or other VM software) run surprisingly well. 

[MarissaOrloff]

1 hour ago, Tara Rojyo said:

Yeah, not really "cloud" that is just using AWS for server on-demand scalability.. which is good but not "cloud".   

Well, their focus on media content creation took a back seat starting 2016 also, but they are trying to take that back.  If Apple can see a profit in gaming, which there is a HUGE profit to be had, it will get into gaming. The difference between Apple gaming on iPhone/iPad and gaming on Mac... is Apple has the former locked down so they can charge whatever they want but Mac is open, currently, so they are not in the same garden.  

The M1Pro 10/16 core actually plays ALL my current AAA games that can play on Mac and at decent FPS.  I do not know much about Vulkan but if that is universal and be implimented on Mac Os that would be cool.  I run GR BP in Vulkan and is butter smooth on my gaming rig (32GB, RTX 3070 8GB FTW, AMD Ryzen 7).  The games I have been able to get running on Mac OS (without parallels or other VM software) run surprisingly well. 

I have a high end machine as well (5900x and RTX 3080).  From the comparable benchmarks that i've seen online even the high end M1Max is a minor league player compared to that. It's much better than the utter garbage they had before but it's still not good enough. No one is ever going to choose a Mac strictly for gaming just like no one would choose a Threadripper or Xeon. For CPU bound tasks the M1Max is incredible, but for gaming no. If Apple really wanted to get into the gaming market they would. They certainly have the resources but they have always treated gaming like a red headed stepchild. You can game on it when your work day is over but its not what its made for.

[Modulated]

11 hours ago, Tara Rojyo said:

I think you greatly underestimate how big of a potential user base is if they simply supported Metal.  This step would instantly make SL native on every single iPad and iPhone (lets just forget Mac for a minute).  If they were able to even get a fraction of those users to play Second Life, iPhone is one of the most popular gaming hand-held systems... ever, it would dwarf the current user base.   IF they were worried about growing SL they would do that, if they are not then they will not.  

What they really need to do, is stop focusing on system based clients and just move completely to the cloud for streaming.  I have used Stadia, Luna, Geforce Now, and Xbox cloud gaming and they all work really good.   This would get rid of any limitations on the client side and move it all to the server side... which might just make LL finally make SL more efficient, updated, and get rid of way outdated legacy stuff. 

This is a potential user base-which I think you are greatly overstating, versus the actual Windows user base, which is the overwhelming majority of SL users.  The Lab needs to get Windows to Vulkan, as OpenGL is on life support at this point-it would be a meaningful transition for the majority of it's users.

Streaming is expensive, and they've tried that in the past already. It went nowhere.