William Gide Posted June 24 Share Posted June 24 To update my earlier comments, I have found the Alchemy beta viewer (with PBR) does fairly well compared to FS or the LL viewers (on my new, 16G m2-pro mac mini). Still occasional choking on texture loading, but in general otherwise fine. I even get reasonable FPS rates (though as a mac user that's not something I've realistically had much chance to fiddle with meaningfully very often). It can sort of even handle shadows, though I leave mirrors solidly off. Just another interface to get used to... 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beren Barragar Posted June 26 Share Posted June 26 (edited) I have found the PBR release of Firestorm to be unusable because of the textures not loading and other weirdness. The official Linden viewer is miles better, and actually looks great. As a compromise, I can recommend the Kokua viewer for Mac - it is based on the Linden viewer, so having few issues at the moment, but they have added a few of the great features from FS, including: favorite wearables; in-built AO; and, joy of joys, Area Search. While browsing the third party viewer directory I came across an experimental Mac viewer called Megaphahit. I gave it a go, cautiously, using an old redundant alt. It is a port of the official viewer to Apple Silicon. Very rough and ready. Basically broken. When I tried to quit, all I got was a black blob in the middle of the screen. Pressing command q repeatedly just made the blackness grow and I resorted to a force quit. But wow... the FPS I enjoyed for the few minutes I was in there. I was on an M2 max Mac Studio, which is a pretty capable machine. I can often get up to 60, 70, even 80 FPS with HiDPI turned on. In Megapahit, I was getting into the high 200s FPS, which I have never seen on my Mac, no matter how low the settings. I can't recommend that viewer for daily use, but it does show that even a rough and ready port over to native Apple Silicon could deliver enormous performance improvements. Edited June 26 by Beren Barragar fixed a typo 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Modulated Posted June 26 Author Share Posted June 26 3 minutes ago, Beren Barragar said: I have found the PBR release of Firestorm to be unusable because of the textures not loading and other weirdness. The official Linden viewer is miles better, and actually looks great. As a compromise, I can recommend the Kokua viewer for Mac - it is based on the Linden viewer, so having few issues at the moment, but they have added a few of the great features from FS, including: favorite wearables; in-built AO; and, joy of joys, Area Search. While browsing the third party viewer directory I came across an experimental Mac viewer called Megaphahit. I gave it a go, cautiously, using an old redundant alt. It is a port of the official viewer to Apple Silicon. Very rough and ready. Basically broken. When I tried to quit, all I got was a black blob in the middle of the screen. Pressing command q repeatedly just made the blackness grow and I resorted to a force quit. But wow... the FPS I enjoyed for the few minutes I was in there. I was on an M2 max Mac Studio, which is a pretty capable machine. I can often get up to 60, 70, even 80 FPS with HiDPI turned on. In Megapahit, I was getting into the high 200s FPS, which I have never seen on my Mac, no matter how low the settings. I can't recommend that viewer for daily use, but it does show that even a rough a ready port over to native Apple Silicon could deliver enormous performance improvements. The issue is from things mentioned in FS support, they are without a Mac dev now, so I don't know who is building them for Mac specifically-but that is a huge issue IMO. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
panterapolnocy Posted June 26 Share Posted June 26 2 minutes ago, Modulated said: The issue is from things mentioned in FS support, they are without a Mac dev now, so I don't know who is building them for Mac specifically-but that is a huge issue IMO. GitHub build servers. See https://www.firestormviewer.org/summer-fun-and-fixes-firestorm-6-6-14/ Quote All of our official builds are created using GitHub build servers; as such, we track supported platforms closely and cannot build for out-of-date platforms. If you run your systems on out-of-support platforms, you may find that Firestorm no longer runs for you. Our current builds are built on the following platforms - Windows Server 2022 (compatible with Windows 10 & 11) - Mac Os: Big Sur (MacOS 11) - Linux: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Also https://www.firestormviewer.org/firestorm-gets-physical-for-a-happy-21st-sl-birthday/ Quote – MacOS – Builds are now made on MacOS12, as all prior MacOS releases have had support removed by Apple and Github. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eris Ravenwood Posted June 26 Share Posted June 26 6 hours ago, Beren Barragar said: While browsing the third party viewer directory I came across an experimental Mac viewer called Megaphahit. I gave it a go, cautiously, using an old redundant alt. It is a port of the official viewer to Apple Silicon. Very rough and ready. Basically broken. When I tried to quit, all I got was a black blob in the middle of the screen. Pressing command q repeatedly just made the blackness grow and I resorted to a force quit. When was the last time you tried Megapahit and experienced this? I admit i’ve only been on SL for a bit under a month now but MPv has been my main viewer on my m1 max mbp for most of that time and I haven’t encountered this issue yet. I’ve been helping the team squash any bugs i’ve run into and at this point, i haven’t encountered any recent huge glaring issues like the one you described. It’s still missing QOL features like built-in AOs, favorite wearables, RLV, and whatnot, but i’ve been having a pretty smooth time running megapahit as a replacement for SL viewer. If you’re still experiencing that black blob thing, do you think you can hop on the discord and help us reproduce it, or file a bug report so we can figure out what’s causing it? 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beren Barragar Posted June 26 Share Posted June 26 53 minutes ago, Eris Ravenwood said: When was the last time you tried Megapahit and experienced this? I admit i’ve only been on SL for a bit under a month now but MPv has been my main viewer on my m1 max mbp for most of that time and I haven’t encountered this issue yet. I’ve been helping the team squash any bugs i’ve run into and at this point, i haven’t encountered any recent huge glaring issues like the one you described. It’s still missing QOL features like built-in AOs, favorite wearables, RLV, and whatnot, but i’ve been having a pretty smooth time running megapahit as a replacement for SL viewer. If you’re still experiencing that black blob thing, do you think you can hop on the discord and help us reproduce it, or file a bug report so we can figure out what’s causing it? It was yesterday (June 25th). I'll try it again and see if it happens again. Happy to help, but I don't use Discord because it is a privacy disaster. 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
observeur Posted June 26 Share Posted June 26 I am also helping with the Megapahit viewer project, more specifically on the Mac optimization part. We are actively working on missing or broken features, and optimizing the performance. You might want checking on the SL group and see what are the options to report an issue (beside Discord). Also note that some of the core optimizations we are working on will be shared with LL so every viewer can benefit them. Beside the actual Apple Silicon native code, there are other areas we are working on that will highly benefit Second Life overall. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FaintOutline Posted June 26 Share Posted June 26 (edited) I have a Mac mini i7 with a Radeon 8gb Vega 64 and it simply will not work with the latest PBR version of Firestorm. Works well enough on my sim -- but any crowded club simply never loads, and I literally mean NEVER. Gray everywhere. The Linden Viewer is not terrible, but I am so out of practice using it. EDIT: I have now spent some time setting up my graphics on the Linden viewer and frankly it is as fast as my non-PBR Firestorm. Firestorm is just totally hopeless, no matter how low I set the graphics it never loads everything in a complex environment. I will most likely never use Firestorm again. Edited June 26 by FaintOutline more experience with PBR 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manoji Yachvili Posted June 27 Share Posted June 27 On 6/21/2024 at 12:07 AM, William Gide said: I wonder myself. I just got my new Mac Mini yesterday — it is the highest one available. I was enjoying going around with a new machine. But, hey, the new PBR firestorm viewer came out. I download that and fired it up — my graphics settings got radically nerfed, and now I see mostly grey as textures take forever to load (which seems like an odd effect of PBR support, but this is hardly something I know much about). I'm used to a texture little delay now and again, but this is remarkable. Unexpectedly the official SL viewer is handling this much better (which has not been my experience of it with textures for years). But still a truly astonishing reduction in capability across the board for a platform that is claimed to be supported. I've always thought that a good game doesn't last long... I don't think I'll buy a PC just to get into SL. (a real shame, plus now I can't even log in...) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gavin Hird Posted June 27 Share Posted June 27 On 6/21/2024 at 12:32 AM, Modulated said: I think the issue is the opengl version that Mac stopped support at, its less than 4.6 and the least they could have done is given that to their users before closing the door it would seem. The highest version is required for pbr and please someone correct me if I am wrong. When Apple deprecates something they basically stop development of the feature and let it fade out into oblivion till the day it is completely removed. OpenGL 4.6 barely was a thing when OpenGL got deprecated (2018) 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gavin Hird Posted June 27 Share Posted June 27 (edited) Checked out the latest Firestorm on a Mac Mini M2 and it runs fine with PBR content (have not found a mirror yet, so that is untested). Machine is running macOS Ventura, so if the bad experience is on a Mac running Sonoma it might behave different because Apple have started removing support in newer drivers included in the newest system versions. Edited June 27 by Gavin Hird 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
William Gide Posted June 28 Share Posted June 28 On 6/26/2024 at 2:24 PM, observeur said: I am also helping with the Megapahit viewer project, more specifically on the Mac optimization part. We are actively working on missing or broken features, and optimizing the performance. Well, Megapahit (on a new m2 mac mini) still has some of the same pathologies of the other PBR viewers (turning on shadows causes plant foliage to not appear, for example), but I will definitely be keeping an eye on it. I've never been one to chase FPS (unless it's awful), but MP was reporting much better than anything I've used on a mac in quite some time. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beren Barragar Posted June 29 Share Posted June 29 It seems I was hasty in my judgement of Megahapit. I've revisited it, and it is much more stable this time around. Maybe I was having issues because it was a brand new, fresh install? It is certainly fast and looks promising. Good, also, to hear that it is under active development and there is a team behind it. I would be curious to know if there are any plans for dealing with OpenGL issues and the whole general future of SL on the Mac, as regards Metal and Vulcan and all that stuff. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
observeur Posted June 29 Share Posted June 29 6 hours ago, Beren Barragar said: It seems I was hasty in my judgement of Megahapit. I've revisited it, and it is much more stable this time around. Maybe I was having issues because it was a brand new, fresh install? It is certainly fast and looks promising. Good, also, to hear that it is under active development and there is a team behind it. I would be curious to know if there are any plans for dealing with OpenGL issues and the whole general future of SL on the Mac, as regards Metal and Vulcan and all that stuff. We are a small team but we have been active indeed. We are currently working on optimizing the performance with OpenGL and the next update promises enormous gains in term of performance and smoothness on Mac with Apple gpus. As for the long term future, there will be plans to migrate to an other renderer, but we need to see how LL sees things in that regard. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
observeur Posted June 29 Share Posted June 29 23 hours ago, William Gide said: Well, Megapahit (on a new m2 mac mini) still has some of the same pathologies of the other PBR viewers (turning on shadows causes plant foliage to not appear, for example), but I will definitely be keeping an eye on it. I've never been one to chase FPS (unless it's awful), but MP was reporting much better than anything I've used on a mac in quite some time. The alpha issue is still present, but there is a workaround, which is activating the mirrors option (i would recommend activating it with the resolution set to "256" and Update Rate set to "Every 4th frame" to minimize performance impact. And most of performance issues that were specific to Mac with apple gpus (slow and laggy 2D and 3D UI, slow downs in crowded or cluttered sims, slow down with particles ...) have been fixed in our latest testing builds. We plan to release this soon. We also keep working on small features and adjustments as well (UI tweaks, faster zoom in, fps limiter ...) and those will be part of upcoming updates. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
observeur Posted June 29 Share Posted June 29 On 6/27/2024 at 9:08 AM, manoji Yachvili said: I've always thought that a good game doesn't last long... I don't think I'll buy a PC just to get into SL. (a real shame, plus now I can't even log in...) After many months of development, Firestorm released their viewer in a hurry because, i believe they wanted it to be available for the SL Birthday events. Performance and issues have been up and down during those months, and it appears Firestorm had some serious issues on Mac, at the very moment they released it. There is the gray texture issues, but also heavy fps drops for no reason after a moment of usage. Earlier versions were actually faster than this one on Mac, but also on Windows. I am certain things will get better and they must be working on a new update without the same pressure as they had when they released this one. We plan to share some of our discoveries regarding performance with LL, so eventually FS will benefit of some of those optimizations we have done on Megapahit (this will take a few weeks or months until it comes to them). 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
observeur Posted June 29 Share Posted June 29 On 6/27/2024 at 1:28 PM, Gavin Hird said: When Apple deprecates something they basically stop development of the feature and let it fade out into oblivion till the day it is completely removed. OpenGL 4.6 barely was a thing when OpenGL got deprecated (2018) As annoying this is, that Apple has deprecated OpenGL, it remains that their (old 4.1) implementation was pretty decent, so there is that at least. Also SL doesn't use much of OpenGL 4.6 features. They have been pretty conservative in that regard. Also, migrating SL to Metal isn't the impossible task you would imagine, and once Apple will get rid of OpenGL, LL or third party developers will find solutions (it's already "in the thoughts" ) 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beren Barragar Posted June 30 Share Posted June 30 The Lindens have, of course, already created an app to run on Apple Silicon - the new mobile viewer. (iPads have pretty much the same hardware inside them as Macs these days, though generally lower specs). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gavin Hird Posted Tuesday at 10:29 AM Share Posted Tuesday at 10:29 AM (edited) On 6/30/2024 at 4:28 PM, Beren Barragar said: The Lindens have, of course, already created an app to run on Apple Silicon - the new mobile viewer. (iPads have pretty much the same hardware inside them as Macs these days, though generally lower specs). Based on Unity. Very limited in terms of functionality Not that Unity necessarily is bad, but I don't think it has the ability to render and handle a dynamic environment like SecondLife. Then there is the licensing issue that basically makes it out of reach for any TPV development. Edited Tuesday at 10:36 AM by Gavin Hird Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AmeliaJ08 Posted Tuesday at 10:57 AM Share Posted Tuesday at 10:57 AM (edited) 29 minutes ago, Gavin Hird said: Based on Unity. Very limited in terms of functionality Not that Unity necessarily is bad, but I don't think it has the ability to render and handle a dynamic environment like SecondLife. Then there is the licensing issue that basically makes it out of reach for any TPV development. It's a start though. If the building blocks are there then building a 'real' viewer for 'real' computers (sorry but you know what I mean) probably looks a lot more feasible. I do have the same worries though, if the Unity viewer is successful then it seems like the obvious step to build a desktop, full-fat viewer... and the death of third party viewers due to licensing, unfortunately. It's just the advantages of using Unity must seem very obvious and it really should be able to match - and exceed - the existing engine. Maybe a good first outing for a real desktop Unity viewer would be for Apple Silicon though, the current performance penalty Apple users are facing is pretty extreme and it seems like the emulation issue is about to come to an abrupt head when Rosetta 2 is killed so there needs to be something in place. Edited Tuesday at 11:00 AM by AmeliaJ08 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BenRoyal Posted 12 hours ago Share Posted 12 hours ago On 6/20/2024 at 6:15 PM, Modulated said: and the problem I think lies with Apple itself. Thoughts? Its not Apples fault that the new Mac viewers developed by Linden and Firestorm don't work well with Macs Thats got be down to either 1 - a lack of technical compatability between what a SL viewer needs to do and the technical capabilities of a mac. and if thats the case, then tough luck for (us) Mac owners. OR 2 - Linden and Firestorms lack of technical ability to make it work. Or their lack of interest and resources to make it work with Mac. (which i think is probably the truth) But you can't really blame Apple. Nothing to do with them whatsover really. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BenRoyal Posted 12 hours ago Share Posted 12 hours ago (edited) On 6/26/2024 at 11:29 PM, FaintOutline said: I have a Mac mini i7 with a Radeon 8gb Vega 64 and it simply will not work with the latest PBR version of Firestorm. Works well enough on my sim -- but any crowded club simply never loads, and I literally mean NEVER. Gray everywhere. The Linden Viewer is not terrible, but I am so out of practice using it. EDIT: I have now spent some time setting up my graphics on the Linden viewer and frankly it is as fast as my non-PBR Firestorm. Firestorm is just totally hopeless, no matter how low I set the graphics it never loads everything in a complex environment. I will most likely never use Firestorm again. My experience is similar to you. i have a 64GB Macbook M2 PRO MAX. Which can run pretty much anything - except SL using the new FS viewer. If I am on my own land, all alone, its not too bad. but as I move around SL, its just a mix of half rendered locations, and lots of grey unrendered objects and avatars. Totally unusable. Edited 12 hours ago by BenRoyal Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BenRoyal Posted 12 hours ago Share Posted 12 hours ago Some people have mentioned 'Megapahit ' - anyone have a URL to download this - at least worth a go I guess? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Madelaine McMasters Posted 12 hours ago Share Posted 12 hours ago 3 minutes ago, BenRoyal said: Some people have mentioned 'Megapahit ' - anyone have a URL to download this - at least worth a go I guess? https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Third_Party_Viewer_Directory Megapahit is near the bottom of the "Active Full Viewers" list. 2 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jase Devin Posted 11 minutes ago Share Posted 11 minutes ago I have a friend he crashes all the time now on his Mac. I think mac uses old open gl. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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