Videos of Firestorm on M3 Max 40c GPU 64GB of RAM

[halleyyyy]

Hello!

I know this has been discussed elsewhere but wanted to do a quick demo of Firestorm running on my M3 Max 40c MBP for those considering getting one.  This is the sort of post I would have loved to see if I was making this decision based on SL performance.

IMO, if the motivation for an upgrade is entirely or mostly SL related its probably not worth it coming from M1 Max or higher; I think the bump is maybe 25-30% in the best case scenarios, basically none in others, but here are the gyazo clips (settings are ultra and appear on the front of most of these):

Empty platform in the sky (gyazo)
My skybox home with just me
Build on the ground with a few bots nearby
WelcomeHub with around a dozen ppl
Very crowded Muddy's Music Cafe

I haven't tested it on my M3 but crowds were manageable on mid or high settings on my M1 Max, but wanted to demo in Ultra on all the videos (and my desktop would do fine in crowds on Ultra with a 5900x CPU and 3080 GPU).

Hope this helps someone!

Edited March 21 by halleyyyy

[Modulated]

Thanks , it helps me to know to never buy one for SL.

[halleyyyy]

I should add though that even though I think its a bad purchase as far as cost to performance if SL is a significant reason for buying a computer (or you have a big Steam library you want to use), its otherwise easily the best computer I've ever used and my reasonably powered desktop feels archaic and backwards in comparison.  It beats my desktop in most benchmarks, apps open instantly like they were already open in the background, and it pulls like 30 watts out of my wall to accomplish all this instead of hundreds.  If something is optimized for ARM and Metal it runs as well as or better than the Windows version on a higher end desktop.  But yeah SL is still jank on Macs by comparison.

But personally its more than usable and doesn't feel worth firing up my loud desktop just for a little extra smoothness most of the time.

Edited March 21 by halleyyyy

[Katherine Heartsong]

As an Apple user since owning an Apple II (yes, that old am I) I'm sadly with @Modulated. Except for those brief moments I need my male alt on transferring me his 300L weekly stipend, I don't run SL on any of my Macs.  That <10fps at Muddy's I see is 40+ for me on my gaming PC, with Ultra settings, even more avatars on screen, and a longer draw distance.

As much as a Mac fanboi I am, I'd never suggest running SL on macOS. But thanks for posting that for folks to reference and decide.

(That low fps might have been partly due to you running the video capture software though I admit, now thinking about it.)

Edited March 21 by Katherine Heartsong

[Spiffy Voxel]

I'm still on a 2017 iMac 27-inch, but Second Life is very usable on it, with Firestorm, Alchemy Viewer (my current daily driver) and even the latest official viewer. A few years ago, it's true that performance was middling, but the viewers have improved massively since then. 🤷

[Fraser Lisle]

It really seems to be struggling hard in the busy Muddy's scene. Of course this is the type of scene that will make most GPUs struggle to varying degrees. This is no real reflection of the actual performance of the M3 GPU of course, it's SL's ancient engine combined with OpenGL to Metal translation layer and what is still a low power, efficient iGPU. It's always going to suffer.

What are your settings for non imposter avatars etc?

 

Edited March 21 by Fraser Lisle

[Fraser Lisle]

2 hours ago, Spiffy Voxel said:

I'm still on a 2017 iMac 27-inch, but Second Life is very usable on it, with Firestorm, Alchemy Viewer (my current daily driver) and even the latest official viewer. A few years ago, it's true that performance was middling, but the viewers have improved massively since then. 🤷

That has an Nvidia GPU doesn't it? Or were they AMD at that time?

 

Edit: some sort of Radeon Pro if Google is correct. I have tested Rx580s etc in SL and yeah they work but performance is poor compared to Nvidia cards of same class and age, its just AMDs slow OpenGL drivers though not the GPU itself.

Edited March 21 by Fraser Lisle

[halleyyyy]

10 minutes ago, Fraser Lisle said:

It really seems to be struggling hard in the busy Muddy's scene. Of course this is the type of scene that will make most GPUs struggle to varying degrees. This is no real reflection of the actual performance of the M3 GPU of course, it's SL's ancient engine combined with OpenGL to Metal translation layer and what is still a low power, efficient iGPU. It's always going to suffer.

What are your settings for non imposter avatars etc?

 

I realize I should have included more info.  On the max non-imposters that was set to 16, but more importantly I'm running it on the HiDPI setting on a 4k monitor.  So if someone was on 1080 or 1440 it would be even better.

Hardware Settings tab
Rendering tab

I probably wasn't clear but what I had in mind with this post was helping answer if the upgrade is worth it from M1 Max to M3 Max, and just based on SL performance I'd say no, the GPU gains are less in SL than I've seen in other things.  And yeah big list of reasons for that!

But I should also be clear I think its actually not worth it to fire up my desktop when I want to use SL, because I think the M1 Max and M3 Max MBPs are actually really good with SL, and so much better at everything else I do on a computer.

[halleyyyy]

Here is with HiDPI off but otherwise ultra settings:

Skybox
Ground

So a 60% bump with it off in the skybox and 25% bump on the ground.

And then back to Muddy's on Mid settings (10-14 FPS instead of 6):
Muddy's mid settings

Edited March 22 by halleyyyy

[halleyyyy]

Ok one more thing lol... I just did the same test on my desktop, which has a Ryzen 9 5900x, Nvidia 3080 12GB, 128 GB of 3600 RAM (lol), and Samsung 980 for the NVMe that Firestorm is running from.  In the skybox its 20% better than my MBP, but at Muddy's I was able to get low 20s FPS in that crowd at least at times, so like 100% better:

PC Desktop - Skybox
PC Desktop - Muddy's

 

Edited March 22 by halleyyyy

[Spiffy Voxel]

11 hours ago, Fraser Lisle said:

That has an Nvidia GPU doesn't it? Or were they AMD at that time?

 

Edit: some sort of Radeon Pro if Google is correct. I have tested Rx580s etc in SL and yeah they work but performance is poor compared to Nvidia cards of same class and age, its just AMDs slow OpenGL drivers though not the GPU itself.

Correct — Radeon Pro 575 with 4GB of VRAM.

As far as performance on my setup goes, yes it wasn't great until a few years ago when the Linden Lab and Firestorm graphics improvements got released, but since then I've been able to use Advanced Lighting — and now PBR — and still have a usable FPS in even the most graphically intensive places like Second Pride, BURN2 or the various Shop & Hops. I don't run around on Ultra graphics settings all the time, however, and have trimmed my settings to balance appearance and performance as much as possible.

[Modulated]

I saw someone mention in the FS beta group the other day about using something called a vulkan wrapper for AMD cards in Windows and that the performance was extremely better on those gpus. No details given about how it was done tho.

[Wesley Spengler]

17 hours ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

As much as a Mac fanboi I am, I'd never suggest running SL on macOS. But thanks for posting that for folks to reference and decide.

Ditto the Mac fanboi thing; me too. I just got a new Mac mini with an M2 Pro a couple of months ago, and have found it to be the best Mac I've ever owned. SL was a secondary consideration for me, but before I knew better and understood the underlying issues, I was hopeful it'd be reasonable for SL use. In some ways, it's acceptable, but this thread proves that you can't just throw more horsepower at something and magically make the real problems go away.

I've not owned a Windows machine since the XP days, but I just bought a mid-level Asus gaming laptop in part for SL, and holy crap... It's nice to run SL on a decent WQHD external monitor with graphics at Ultra and consistently see 60 to 100 fps — instead of the 10 to 15 fps range (often less) even at middling graphics settings. 

In other news, Windows is still the ugly mess it's always been, with the added "benefit" of Microsoft using it as a direct marketing channel every chance it gets. 🙄 

[Nofunawo]

6 hours ago, Wesley Spengler said:

...a mid-level Asus gaming laptop in part for SL, and holy crap... It's nice to run SL on a decent WQHD external monitor with graphics at Ultra and consistently see 60 to 100 fps 

Kidding? Or never left the sky platform?

[Wesley Spengler]

1 hour ago, Nofunawo said:

Kidding? Or never left the sky platform?

No, not kidding, and it's ground-level in Bellisseria's log home area where my Linden Home is. The monitor is 2560 x 1440 and capable of 180 Hz refresh, but the laptop itself is designed for 1920x1080 at 144 Hz. At the higher res with the external monitor, it chooses 60 Hz refresh (via G-Sync), and Firestorm is showing at or very near 60 fps consistently. At the laptops native resolution, it'll hit 100 fps or so, but depends on where I am, if I'm moving, etc. I've not tested how it works in a crowd; that'll happen tonight.

For the record, the laptop has an AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS processor, 16GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050. 

[Kaladin]

I am and have been a main Mac user since 2002 - the flat panel iMac G4. I am typing this response on my relatively new iMac M3 as I use it for most things - except running the SL client.

Whilst modern Macs and their architecture should be well capable of running a client like SL the fact that you have the Apple stance on not updating (or even acknowledging OpenGL) for years combined with the fact that it is Intel code having to be run through Rosetta2 means that hardware is hamstringed.  My iMac M3 has 24GB ram which is super for my needs on photography & video but FPS in SL is woefully low in all but the most empty of places.

Unless the SL client magically manages to replace OpenGL with a fully Metal compliant engine in a universal app (not financially feasible imho) running SL on any flavour of a Mac will continue to be a very slow and painful experience. However it is possible if you do not have a gaming laptop handy.

Edited March 23 by Kaladin

[Modulated]

At least with the older intel based macs you could use an external gpu , but with the M based ones they removed the support for that for whatever reason. LL has mentioned the successor to opengl is ultimately vulkan but I don't think Macs support that either, so who knows what direction it will all go.

[AmeliaJ08]

On 3/22/2024 at 10:26 AM, Spiffy Voxel said:

Correct — Radeon Pro 575 with 4GB of VRAM.

As far as performance on my setup goes, yes it wasn't great until a few years ago when the Linden Lab and Firestorm graphics improvements got released, but since then I've been able to use Advanced Lighting — and now PBR — and still have a usable FPS in even the most graphically intensive places like Second Pride, BURN2 or the various Shop & Hops. I don't run around on Ultra graphics settings all the time, however, and have trimmed my settings to balance appearance and performance as much as possible.

I wonder how much of that is to do with something I read about AMD's drivers, I think people said that it on Linux their OpenGL driver performs as expected and that the issues were with the Windows driver for some reason. I assume the MacOS driver has a lot more in common with the Linux driver?

 

[Spiffy Voxel]

14 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

I wonder how much of that is to do with something I read about AMD's drivers, I think people said that it on Linux their OpenGL driver performs as expected and that the issues were with the Windows driver for some reason. I assume the MacOS driver has a lot more in common with the Linux driver?

 

From what I can tell, AMD don't appear to have much input (pun intended) into the display driver system on macOS — it's mostly Apple's stuff, so any performance issues are most likely on them.

[Kaladin]

Just an an update I went to the same sim using the same draw settings....

On iMac M3 with 24GB RAM the fps varied between 42 and 36 FPS

On MSI Laptop with RTX4070 the fps varied between 170 and 140 FPS

These were not deserted sims but an event sim from the destination guide with people popping in and out all the time but on average 15 people on sim and within cam range.

The iMac can cope with it but it's not as great as a machine which does not need to convert the code from a different processor and has dedicated gfx.