Are viewers for Mac on borrowed time?

[Anicha Heartsong]

On 7/6/2024 at 3:08 PM, BenRoyal said:

i have a 64GB Macbook M2 PRO MAX.  Which can run pretty much anything - except SL using the new FS viewer.

I have an M3 Pro Macbook Pro (yes, really, that's how bad Apple's naming conventions are) and an M2 Max Mac Studio and they can breeze through pretty much anything - but can't make the new FS viewer play nice. Lots of unloaded textures, poor performance etc etc. I'm using a mix of the last pre-PBR Firestorm and Kokua viewer now and then. I'm sure the FS team can fix things in time.

[Michel Morningstar]

I use a MacBook Pro - M3 chip. I confirm all the issues about textures staying grey on FS 7.1.9; even when they eventually load, passing a region border reactivates the nightmare including on my avatar's body, clothes and attachments.

I do not have these issues with the LL viewer, which does a pretty good job. On my Mac, the LL viewer gives better image quality and better fps at equivalent settings.

[discussionbot]

1 hour ago, Anicha Heartsong said:

I have an M3 Pro Macbook Pro (yes, really, that's how bad Apple's naming conventions are) and an M2 Max Mac Studio and they can breeze through pretty much anything - but can't make the new FS viewer play nice. Lots of unloaded textures, poor performance etc etc. I'm using a mix of the last pre-PBR Firestorm and Kokua viewer now and then. I'm sure the FS team can fix things in time.

Oof. I sure hope so, or else it's adios SL for the time being. The new Pretentious Bloody Rubbish™ Firestorm will finally help me waste less time on SL, so maybe that's a good thing. 

[Madelaine McMasters]

1 hour ago, Michel Morningstar said:

I use a MacBook Pro - M3 chip. I confirm all the issues about textures staying grey on FS 7.1.9; even when they eventually load, passing a region border reactivates the nightmare including on my avatar's body, clothes and attachments.

I do not have these issues with the LL viewer, which does a pretty good job. On my Mac, the LL viewer gives better image quality and better fps at equivalent settings.

My M1 Max MacBook Pro seems to be doing okay under PBR. I've (so far) made only two setting changes.

1) In Debug Settings (available from the Advanced Menu), I've set "RenderGLmultithreadedtextures" to “TRUE”.
2) In Preferences->Graphics->Hardware Settings, I've unchecked "Override VRAM detection" and dedicated half my Mac's total memory (32GB of 64GB) for VRAM.

Both of these changes come with warnings, either from the viewer itself, or people in the wider FS community. They've also been suggested by people in the Mac FS community.

Caveat emptor!

Edited July 8 by Madelaine McMasters
Ever present typos.

[SandorWren]

I just got an offline IM from Caitlin. She installed the new FS PBR viewer, and after 22 minutes, things still hadn't fully loaded. She was an orange cloud for 18 minutes.

[Modulated]

12 minutes ago, Bagnu said:

I just got an offline IM from Caitlin. She installed the new FS PBR viewer, and after 22 minutes, things still hadn't fully loaded. She was an orange cloud for 18 minutes.

It was mentioned in FS support the other day that the next viewer will have fixes in place specifically for Mac users, hopefully it addresses the many issues faced by those on them.

[SandorWren]

2 minutes ago, Modulated said:

It was mentioned in FS support the other day that the next viewer will have fixes in place specifically for Mac users, hopefully it addresses the many issues faced by those on them.

Thanks!!! I'll let her know. I wish she would just login to the forums, and at least read what people are saying. I end up being the middleman, and I don't even have a MAC!!! I sent her a link to this thread.

[Modulated]

A new beta was just put out in the FS preview group, Mac users might want to give it a go.

[Anicha Heartsong]

On 7/8/2024 at 2:24 PM, Madelaine McMasters said:

I've (so far) made only two setting changes.

1) In Debug Settings (available from the Advanced Menu), I've set "RenderGLmultithreadedtextures" to “TRUE”.
2) In Preferences->Graphics->Hardware Settings, I've unchecked "Override VRAM detection" and dedicated half my Mac's total memory (32GB of 64GB) for VRAM.

Thanks Madelaine, these changes have made a huge difference.

However, there may be a typo in those instructions... Don't you mean that you checked "Override VRAM detection" - otherwise you can't set how much memory is dedicated for VRAM????

Edited July 11 by Anicha Heartsong
Typo corrected. Oh the irony....

[Madelaine McMasters]

21 hours ago, Anicha Heartsong said:

Thanks Madelaine, these changes have may a huge difference.

However, there may be a typo in those instructions... Don't you mean that you checked "Override VRAM detection" - otherwise you can't set how much memory is dedicated for VRAM????

You're right. Thanks for catching that error, Anicha.

[Sid Nagy]

Swimming against the stream is always harder than going with the flow.
No exceptions.

[BenRoyal]

On 7/8/2024 at 11:45 AM, Anicha Heartsong said:

I have an M3 Pro Macbook Pro (yes, really, that's how bad Apple's naming conventions are) and an M2 Max Mac Studio and they can breeze through pretty much anything - but can't make the new FS viewer play nice. Lots of unloaded textures, poor performance etc etc. I'm using a mix of the last pre-PBR Firestorm and Kokua viewer now and then. I'm sure the FS team can fix things in time.

And today - i noticed that my older FS will now not load, so you are forced to use the new FS.  Which kind of cuks.  The previous version worked fine with macs. 

[Omegaslayer]

sadly it's not just macs, whilst us mac users are having a worse time windows users are having a ***** time of it too. I know with none pbr second life i can get a good 20 fps in a busyish rp sim, with a pbr viewer im down to at least 5fps on the lowest settings. That and it makes my fan go crazy which i don't like. It's almost like second life is no longer optimised, i mean when i tab out of none pbr second life my fan turns off and sl winds down a little so its not doing as hard of a job. PBR viewer doesn't do that, the fan goes regardless and i've heard fan problems with pc users too. 

[Omegaslayer]

On 7/12/2024 at 7:47 PM, BenRoyal said:

And today - i noticed that my older FS will now not load, so you are forced to use the new FS.  Which kind of cuks.  The previous version worked fine with macs. 

6.6.17 firestorm works fine, i'm using it as i type

Edited July 18 by Omegaslayer

[AmeliaJ08]

On 7/18/2024 at 5:48 PM, Omegaslayer said:

sadly it's not just macs, whilst us mac users are having a worse time windows users are having a ***** time of it too. I know with none pbr second life i can get a good 20 fps in a busyish rp sim, with a pbr viewer im down to at least 5fps on the lowest settings. That and it makes my fan go crazy which i don't like. It's almost like second life is no longer optimised, i mean when i tab out of none pbr second life my fan turns off and sl winds down a little so its not doing as hard of a job. PBR viewer doesn't do that, the fan goes regardless and i've heard fan problems with pc users too. 

Were you disabling ALM on the pre-PBR FS?

Help > About Firestorm. Copy/paste the output here and there might be some useful information.

It does run fine but you need appropriate hardware, there's no amount of optimisation that can change certain things and if you couldn't run ALM you definitely cannot run PBR.

 

[Naira Blakewell]

There seems to a lot of confusion here with multiple issues being mixed up.

1. Texture Loading in PBR viewers 

This has nothing to do with Apple/Macs etc. Linden Labs has implemented a new texture-loading priority queue algorithm that now longer loads textures based on distance from the avatar, but rather in order of increasing size of texture. The idea here is that small textures should be quickly loaded to help rendering PBR etc. Because PBR lighting and reflections mean that textures can affect each other. Unfortunately, this means that depending on view distance you may have wait a long while before anything loads in your vicinity. Additionally, moving your avatar does absolutely nothing. But if you load new textures (prims. chlothes etc.) during this time, the texture loading order changes and everything starts all over again.

2. OpenGL on Apple

OpenGL is an almost obsolete technology. It will be depreciated on all modern platforms and replaced by Vulkan. Windows will continue to have DirectX, and Apple will have Metal. Vulkan can operate with Metal through MoltenVK. This is just a case of SL's technology being old and needing and upgrade.

3. There is reason for hope

The first SL builds for the iPad are already in alpha testing. The more relevant point here is that it means the basic 3D rendering engine for SL has now already been ported to ARM processors (iPads run Cortex A/ and M-series CPUs). Once something runs on the iPad, it will run on M-series Macs - there are several applications in the App Store demonstrating this. All that remains is to make the interface suitable for touch/trackpad/mouse appropriately.

I expect what we are going to see is that the x64-MacOS viewer will be completely deprecated in favour of MacOS/iOS/iPadOS ARM viewer.

Edited July 23 by Naira Blakewell

[AmeliaJ08]

22 minutes ago, Naira Blakewell said:

I expect what we are going to see is that the x64-MacOS viewer will be completely deprecated in favour of MacOS/iOS/iPadOS ARM viewer.

Worth noting that this means it will be the official viewer, no more third parties. Well, we are assuming so since the engine it is using is licensed and the viewer will be full of proprietary, licensed stuff.

Not a great future IMO.

 

[BriannaLovey]

8 hours ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Worth noting that this means it will be the official viewer, no more third parties. Well, we are assuming so since the engine it is using is licensed and the viewer will be full of proprietary, licensed stuff.

Not a great future IMO.

 

This will eventually happen to all operating systems that SL supports, if the decrease in development cost outweighs whatever fees SL must pay to use Unity. If that happens, the incentive to keep maintaining third-party viewers will completely die off, assuming they are not outright banned to begin with in the future.

[Omegaslayer]

On 7/23/2024 at 10:56 AM, Naira Blakewell said:

There seems to a lot of confusion here with multiple issues being mixed up.

1. Texture Loading in PBR viewers 

This has nothing to do with Apple/Macs etc. Linden Labs has implemented a new texture-loading priority queue algorithm that now longer loads textures based on distance from the avatar, but rather in order of increasing size of texture. The idea here is that small textures should be quickly loaded to help rendering PBR etc. Because PBR lighting and reflections mean that textures can affect each other. Unfortunately, this means that depending on view distance you may have wait a long while before anything loads in your vicinity. Additionally, moving your avatar does absolutely nothing. But if you load new textures (prims. chlothes etc.) during this time, the texture loading order changes and everything starts all over again.

2. OpenGL on Apple

OpenGL is an almost obsolete technology. It will be depreciated on all modern platforms and replaced by Vulkan. Windows will continue to have DirectX, and Apple will have Metal. Vulkan can operate with Metal through MoltenVK. This is just a case of SL's technology being old and needing and upgrade.

3. There is reason for hope

The first SL builds for the iPad are already in alpha testing. The more relevant point here is that it means the basic 3D rendering engine for SL has now already been ported to ARM processors (iPads run Cortex A/ and M-series CPUs). Once something runs on the iPad, it will run on M-series Macs - there are several applications in the App Store demonstrating this. All that remains is to make the interface suitable for touch/trackpad/mouse appropriately.

I expect what we are going to see is that the x64-MacOS viewer will be completely deprecated in favour of MacOS/iOS/iPadOS ARM viewer.

i have a 2020 ipad pro i was gifted so i am hoping we get a full release for the mobile viewer, other than that i'm not holding out hope that linden labs will optimise things to work better for older macs, which sucks because i like playing second life on my 2015 macbook pro. I'm not here for fancy photography abilities im here for rp, i love rping in second life.

[AmeliaJ08]

8 hours ago, Omegaslayer said:

i have a 2020 ipad pro i was gifted so i am hoping we get a full release for the mobile viewer, other than that i'm not holding out hope that linden labs will optimise things to work better for older macs, which sucks because i like playing second life on my 2015 macbook pro. I'm not here for fancy photography abilities im here for rp, i love rping in second life.

Is there a CoolVL for MacOS? Henri has committed to keeping the ability to disable ALM/PBR in it. Pre-PBR versions of Firestorm should probably work until the end of the year and maybe into 2025 (3 version rule I think?) so you could go that way.

Edit: there is, here: http://sldev.free.fr/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=14&start=1000000

 

Edited August 1 by AmeliaJ08

[Omegaslayer]

15 hours ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Is there a CoolVL for MacOS? Henri has committed to keeping the ability to disable ALM/PBR in it. Pre-PBR versions of Firestorm should probably work until the end of the year and maybe into 2025 (3 version rule I think?) so you could go that way.

Edit: there is, here: http://sldev.free.fr/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=14&start=1000000

 

i know people have suggested coolvl but its not properly supported for mac as far as i can tell, and yeah im forced to use pre pbr second life on firestorm, i like my 20 fps in a busy sim over 4fps on pbr in a busy sim. 

Edited August 2 by Omegaslayer

[Omegaslayer]

On 7/23/2024 at 7:55 PM, BriannaLovey said:

This will eventually happen to all operating systems that SL supports, if the decrease in development cost outweighs whatever fees SL must pay to use Unity. If that happens, the incentive to keep maintaining third-party viewers will completely die off, assuming they are not outright banned to begin with in the future.

yeah and if this is competing with roblox and other online games i don't see this as a future. I don't like roblox but it runs like a dream against the likes of pbr second life. Maybe unity would be a good choice for stability but unlike other online games i like that second life has third party viewers, it makes for interesting add ons linden labs would never use themselves.