Tara Rojyo

What FPS are you getting? I can stand still with few avatars around and get 30+ FPS but once I get a few avatars like a semi busy shop it drops like a rock down to ~12 FPS. I have the new 16" MBP M1Pro (Same specs as yours just bigger screen).

I agree, I thought my post stated that. The AAA games I could get to run on the new M1Pro's played at "decent" FPS, not great, not amazing BUT for a Mac it was a HUGE improvement. I just wish Apple would get serious into the gaming market.

All speculation of course on potential users, however some facts can at least shed light on why I speculate this way. Fortunately due to the court battle between Epic and Apple we were able to get some data on how large Apple is in gaming AND how many current Apple users there are in the world. The last data I was able to quickly google on Second Life is that it lost half of its user based from 2013 to 2018 from 1 million users to 500K users. We found out that Apples gaming share is larger then Nintendo, Activision, Microsoft, and Sony combined and has over 1 billion active users. Lets just say 1/2% of those users would come to SL if LL decided to make an app that worked on iPhone/iPad (because lets be honest, mobile gaming is what is in now) that is 1 million "potential users". But this is all just speculation, my point was/is you should not ignore the forest because you have a few trees. Window users are not growing, this is a fact. They are shrinking. To stay relevant they need to bring in NEW users and the biggest potential user base is on Apple iOS devices. (Or Android but their gaming share is not as big as Apples) I do agree that OpenGL needs to go, the issue is LL keeps trying to play "catchup" and not innovating new technologies.

Yeah, not really "cloud" that is just using AWS for server on-demand scalability.. which is good but not "cloud". Well, their focus on media content creation took a back seat starting 2016 also, but they are trying to take that back. If Apple can see a profit in gaming, which there is a HUGE profit to be had, it will get into gaming. The difference between Apple gaming on iPhone/iPad and gaming on Mac... is Apple has the former locked down so they can charge whatever they want but Mac is open, currently, so they are not in the same garden. The M1Pro 10/16 core actually plays ALL my current AAA games that can play on Mac and at decent FPS. I do not know much about Vulkan but if that is universal and be implimented on Mac Os that would be cool. I run GR BP in Vulkan and is butter smooth on my gaming rig (32GB, RTX 3070 8GB FTW, AMD Ryzen 7). The games I have been able to get running on Mac OS (without parallels or other VM software) run surprisingly well.

I think you greatly underestimate how big of a potential user base is if they simply supported Metal. This step would instantly make SL native on every single iPad and iPhone (lets just forget Mac for a minute). If they were able to even get a fraction of those users to play Second Life, iPhone is one of the most popular gaming hand-held systems... ever, it would dwarf the current user base. IF they were worried about growing SL they would do that, if they are not then they will not. What they really need to do, is stop focusing on system based clients and just move completely to the cloud for streaming. I have used Stadia, Luna, Geforce Now, and Xbox cloud gaming and they all work really good. This would get rid of any limitations on the client side and move it all to the server side... which might just make LL finally make SL more efficient, updated, and get rid of way outdated legacy stuff.

Well if they are going to do Metal for iPad then it would be extremely minor to port that to Mac now that both use the same chips it would just be screen res as the difference. The only thing stopping ANY iPad app from working on the new M1x Macs is the devs of the app turning a switch to allow it to.

I have to agree with you Lyssa, it seems the only reason they still have a Mac client at all currently is because they do not have to put any real work into it. However it is a real shame when a 8 year old Windows 7 computer can out perform a state-of-art brand new 10 core Mac when you can run current AAA games at above 60 FPS because they made the decision to support Metal (Of maybe MoltenVK). I thought one of the big reasons for moving SL to the cloud was for a web viewer based client that would work on any platform as long as you had a broadband connection?

Yeah figured it was just a numbers game.. ROI just not there. However I still blame LL not Apple on this, LL has more to lose in client experience than Apple does. A lot of companies have invested to building native apps for Apple so there is a market.

Why would they insist on using one Vulkan to map to Metal instead of JUST doing Metal in the first place. Everyone knows that once you start adding "middle man" into programming it just slows things down. Unless you are implying they do not see any reason to care about SL on Mac, I am sure the user base cannot be that big.

Weird I run SL (Firestorm) on OS M.2 SSD (primary) and the cache on my Game Data M.2 SSD (2 of 4 SSD's) and have not seen a noticeable performance impact but I think I will run some tests and see

I just got my 14" MBP M1Pro base and got firestorm running... while it runs better then on my older M1 MBP 13" my 5 year old Windows computer will still run circles around it without even getting warm. Until LL decides to do a native client with Metal support I do not think SL will ever really run "great" on Mac OS. However when I say "great" I do it while comparing it to my gaming rigs... so maybe it does run good compared to a on-chip GPU for windows *shrugs* At my SL house on med-high (half way between the two), 128m view and advanced lighting enabled I am getting 32 FPS, on my gaming rig at the same location at Ultra settings and 256m veiw I can get 75FPS.

It is not just you, no images are showing currently on the Marketplace it seems. So I am shopping in-world for those that have an in-world.