martinmoun Posted March 16, 2023 Share Posted March 16, 2023 (edited) Hello there, who would share some experience regarding M1 and M2 based machines? Macs use to pant and sweat running the SL viewers. How is the performance of the SL Viewer and Firestorm on M1 and M2 Macs? Is it significantly better? thank you! Martin. Edited March 16, 2023 by martinmoun Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Coffee Pancake Posted March 16, 2023 Share Posted March 16, 2023 I have a Macbook Air M1, it's an awesome laptop experience that can do SL in a pinch. None of the Mac viewers are M1 native yet. None of the Mac viewers use Metal. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anicha Heartsong Posted March 16, 2023 Share Posted March 16, 2023 I have an M1 Mac Mini from 2020 with only 8GB of Ram and it is better than my Hackintosh which had 16GB of Ram and a reasonable 8GB graphics card. It really struggles in very crowded environments - where I generally have to derender all the other avis by default and manually render the ones I might wish to see. One of the ways the modern macs control excessive heat is through thermal throttling. What this means is that if the machine is getting too hot, the system will seize all the CPU resources (using the kernel_task process) effectively freezing the offending app until things cool down. This can be very annoying. I use an app called TG Pro to control my fan - which will never turn on even if the machine is getting warm. The app will turn them on for me, and it is very flexible and easy to configure. So my advice would be to get a machine with a fan that you can use when you need to. The Macbook Air options don't have fans. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
martinmoun Posted March 16, 2023 Author Share Posted March 16, 2023 (edited) Thanks a lot for the replies so far. I am sure that the M1 / M2 machines are awesome. I was interested to know if there is a significant change (in good way / bad way) compared to the INTEL based machines. Edited March 16, 2023 by martinmoun 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
martinmoun Posted March 16, 2023 Author Share Posted March 16, 2023 1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said: I have a Macbook Air M1, it's an awesome laptop experience that can do SL in a pinch. None of the Mac viewers are M1 native yet. None of the Mac viewers use Metal. Sounds like "obviously better" than pre-M1 machines...?! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gavin Hird Posted March 16, 2023 Share Posted March 16, 2023 The performance depends entirely on which Mac you compare with. It probably does better on M1 and M2 configurations than most of the Intel based Macs, but there are still Intel based Macs with better graphics performance than the M1/M2 Airs, MB, MBP and Mac minis. The high end Studios will most likely do better than any Intel based Mac with the exception of the 2019 Mac Pro, and the high end 2020 iMac. Fan noise is infinitely better on the M1/M2 machines. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anicha Heartsong Posted March 16, 2023 Share Posted March 16, 2023 I agree with Gavin. The M1 /M2s are 'better' than intel, but there's a huge range of capabilities. A Macbook Air is designed mostly for day-to-day computing, browsers, email and the like. The top end Mac Studio is an awesome machine that can sail through video editing. It's for people who edit movies for a living. But it costs $4,000 - entry level. You can pay four times that if you max it out. Personally, I would not at this point even consider buying an Intel Mac. Apple has moved on and the Intel machines may fall behind on OS updates and the like quite soon. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Coffee Pancake Posted March 17, 2023 Share Posted March 17, 2023 I've done video editing on my M1 Macbook Air .. it was surprisingly awesome. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gavin Hird Posted March 19, 2023 Share Posted March 19, 2023 On 3/16/2023 at 11:29 PM, Anicha Heartsong said: Personally, I would not at this point even consider buying an Intel Mac. Apple has moved on and the Intel machines may fall behind on OS updates and the like quite soon. There is only one Intel Mac you can buy new: the Mac Pro, and I would certainly not buy that for SL (or at all really). I was referring to current Intel Mac owners, many of which have machines that will still be a better fit for running the SL viewers than the M1/M2 machines. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gavin Hird Posted March 19, 2023 Share Posted March 19, 2023 On 3/17/2023 at 1:00 AM, Coffee Pancake said: I've done video editing on my M1 Macbook Air .. it was surprisingly awesome. It is awesome for video editing because the CPUs have dedicated video encoders/decoders, in addition to (very) fast storage and high memory bandwidth to memory closely integrated to the CPU. For other tasks YMMV, but the high single core performance makes them feel snappy, even for Rosetta2 translated apps. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
anitabush Posted March 21, 2023 Share Posted March 21, 2023 I’d just like an acknowledgement from Linden that they either planning a native viewer or they aren’t. The silence is frustrating 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gavin Hird Posted March 21, 2023 Share Posted March 21, 2023 28 minutes ago, anitabush said: I’d just like an acknowledgement from Linden that they either planning a native viewer or they aren’t. The silence is frustrating Don't have high hopes on that one. They are fantasizing about building a Vulkan based viewer on a framework Apple never will allow to run native on their systems, and which can break at any update of Metal Apple turns out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Henri Beauchamp Posted March 22, 2023 Share Posted March 22, 2023 There might be some hope in the future to run viewers at full speed (i.e. in native ARM code) on M1/2 Macs, on the condition to replace macOS with Linux... 😛 See this article about progresses done with OpenGL drivers (Mesa) for Linux on M1/2 Macs. Once the OpenGL driver issue solved, you could grab the Cool VL Viewer sources and compile them for native ARM Linux (as already done with some ARM SBCs)... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gavin Hird Posted March 22, 2023 Share Posted March 22, 2023 9 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said: There might be some hope in the future to run viewers at full speed (i.e. in native ARM code) on M1/2 Macs, on the condition to replace macOS with Linux... 😛 See this article about progresses done with OpenGL drivers (Mesa) for Linux on M1/2 Macs. Once the OpenGL driver issue solved, you could grab the Cool VL Viewer sources and compile them for native ARM Linux (as already done with some ARM SBCs)... Sure can do, but Mac users don't buy their machines to boot into Linux. So you would only catch an insignificantly small user base that way. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Henri Beauchamp Posted March 22, 2023 Share Posted March 22, 2023 1 hour ago, Gavin Hird said: So you would only catch an insignificantly small user base that way. That would depend on the differential speed: a native viewer performing 5 to 10 times better than an one running under x86_64 and OpenGL emulations would certainly represent a big incentive... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lyssa Greymoon Posted March 22, 2023 Share Posted March 22, 2023 1 hour ago, Henri Beauchamp said: That would depend on the differential speed: a native viewer performing 5 to 10 times better than an one running under x86_64 and OpenGL emulations would certainly represent a big incentive... I'd quit using Second Life before I switched from macOS to Linux. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Love Zhaoying Posted March 22, 2023 Share Posted March 22, 2023 Isn't MacOS going to "stop working" with Second Life viewers, once Apple stops supporting OpenGL completely? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JeromFranzic Posted March 22, 2023 Share Posted March 22, 2023 If SL is moving towards Vulkan, there's the MoltenVK API to consider. That library runs on top of Metal. Could be the API for a OS X native SL viewer. https://moltengl.com/moltenvk/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Coffee Pancake Posted March 22, 2023 Share Posted March 22, 2023 22 hours ago, anitabush said: I’d just like an acknowledgement from Linden that they either planning a native viewer or they aren’t. The silence is frustrating LL are working towards Vulkan with a metal wrapper for Mac's as the door on opengl closes. If M3 is announced as legacy free .. maybe in the year before the last x86 Mac drops from the supported list ? The changes to the core viewer code for ARM aren't that substantial, it's everything else the viewer needs to actually run. Rendering api, libraries, etc etc. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gavin Hird Posted March 22, 2023 Share Posted March 22, 2023 6 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said: That would depend on the differential speed: a native viewer performing 5 to 10 times better than an one running under x86_64 and OpenGL emulations would certainly represent a big incentive... What delusion are you under that it would perform 5 to 10 times better? Native code, be it regular code, Metal, video decode/encode is running damn fast on the Apple Silicon processors, and there is no performance gain to speak of to be had running Linux. Also, while Apple has actually done some good work to enable booting other operating systems on the AS Macs, the iOS and iPadOS devices has the boot manager completely locked down. Meaning there cannot be a Linux alternative on these devices. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gavin Hird Posted March 22, 2023 Share Posted March 22, 2023 1 hour ago, JeromFranzic said: If SL is moving towards Vulkan, there's the MoltenVK API to consider. That library runs on top of Metal. Could be the API for a OS X native SL viewer. https://moltengl.com/moltenvk/ As long as it is not supported by Apple, it can break at any system update. In addition it only supports a subset of Vulkan because there are some significant differences between the Metal it is translated to and Vulkan itself. The other difference is that Metal itself is a tile based renderer, which is a significant depart from the current and future Vulkan renderers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gavin Hird Posted March 22, 2023 Share Posted March 22, 2023 1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said: LL are working towards Vulkan with a metal wrapper for Mac's as the door on opengl closes. If M3 is announced as legacy free .. maybe in the year before the last x86 Mac drops from the supported list ? The changes to the core viewer code for ARM aren't that substantial, it's everything else the viewer needs to actually run. Rendering api, libraries, etc etc. If they announce the Apple Silicon replacement for the Mac Pro this spring, chances are OpenGL support will be dropped from the next macOS to be announced at WWDC in June. This will be coupled with a major update of Metal, which only will run on the small selection of Intel based machines supported by Ventura and Apple Silicon based Macs. If the Mac Pro announcement is postponed till this fall, we will most likely see another year of OpenGL support. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
martinmoun Posted March 22, 2023 Author Share Posted March 22, 2023 Does LL publish numbers / statistics about the usage of platforms like Linux, MacOS, Windows in SL? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gavin Hird Posted March 22, 2023 Share Posted March 22, 2023 (edited) 2 minutes ago, martinmoun said: Does LL publish numbers / statistics about the usage of platforms like Linux, MacOS, Windows in SL? Not really, but they have hinted at Linux around 1%, macOS around 15% and the rest Windows. Of content creators macOS usage may be as high as 25%, but that too is just a hint and not a hard figure. Edited March 22, 2023 by Gavin Hird 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Randy Pole Posted March 23, 2023 Share Posted March 23, 2023 I can only give my own experience. I used to use a Mac Pro (trashcan) with 1GB SDD, 16GB RAM and two GPU's. SL ran ok as far as I was aware - it got lower FPS in crowded places but that's SL for you. As the Mac Pro was relegated to not being worthy of the update to Ventura I decided it was time for an "upgrade" - though my personal financial situation is far from what it was when I could afford a Mac Pro. I got a Mac mini M1 with 8GB Ram and to be honest it handles SL far better than the Mac Pro did. There are still issues with low fps in busy places but that is never going to go away. If you are considering taking the plunge it may be worthwhile waiting a little bit. I suspect that the prices are going to come down with newer hardware releases so you might be able to get an M2 later on for quite a bit less. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
YouTube
Flickr
Recommended Posts
Please take a moment to consider if this thread is worth bumping.