Court Goodman

Not current, but my Mac Pro from 3 years ago: a dual 3GHZ Quad Xeon with Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT can render shadows, anti-ailiasing, etc, albeit at 1-3FPS when a sim is empty. But it does work. Here's a photo to prove it: http://www.flickr.com/photos/courtgoodman/5339359343/ When I first picked up this machine, it took a year for SL to render correctly. Major bugs, crashes, the usual Mac stuff. I have learned (also with 5 years in SL) that there needs to be a huge asterisk next to the term "multi-platform". My brand new (3 days old) MacBook Pro cant render squat. Looks like Second Life in 2006. Kind of a bummer, with twice the video memory, but that's the way SL has always been with MacBooks. No anti-aliasing, and complete crash meltdown when I tried turning on shadows. It could be the new ATI video, as opposed to the Nvidia video that Macs used to have..who knows. I stopped following as it caused too much frustration in my daily life. Best thing to do, IMO, is get/build a cheap PC with a fat video card. You can do it for as little as $500-$700, and you can gradually improve the computer with new components over time, such as video cards, much more easily. Gaming just isn't a big market on the Mac, and the penalty is bad compatibility. It's just easier for video card companies to stay caught up in the Windows side than on the Mac side, due to the high market of individual components. I've always kept a PC close by for those few things that it does better--gaming graphics being one of them. You can build up a PC meeting the exact specs that SL requires. It's impossible to do so on a Mac. If you must have a Mac for SL, then my recommendation is to find a Mac Pro like mine described above on the used market, but they're still pricey. I hate PCs and I love Macs, but it's just a fact of life. Good luck, -Court ************************** UPDATE: I just installed Windows 7 and Bootcamp on my new Macbook, and it renders shadows, or anti-ailiasing, but not both. However the SL experience is much nicer when running via Windows/Bootcamp on the Mac. So, that's an option for you-- Partition part of your drive for Bootcamp, Install WIndows 7, and run SL from there.