Alise Morningstar

Hi KjartanEno, totally agree it would be helpful to see back to back comparison of the M1 Mac against Intel/AMD. So, I've tried to do just that with what I have! To be fair to many of those commenting on the M1 vs Intel MacBook debate, they are comparing the M1 against older MacBooks. I don't have such a machine to hand, but I do have a 3 year old Dell business laptop. No discrete graphics chip, just the Intel UHD630. M1 MacBook (16GB) running the LL Second Life viewer, the Dell running Firestorm under Ubuntu Linux. No fancy PyFX (got look into that...). I went to a nice forest with lots of trees/objects around, and set the graphics settings as close to each other as I could, first shadows on, then shadows off, per your challenge. Draw distance 192 for everything. Note the Dell screen resolution is smaller than the MacBook, which I haven't tried to compensate for here. Both at native resolution. Long story short, the 2 machines are pretty similar. M1 gets 3.3/17.3 fps with shadows on/off. Dell gets 3.2/11.4 fps. The bottom line is the M1 MacBook Pro will get you decent enough performance with low graphics settings, and will probably beat an Intel discrete graphics laptop from the last few years, but not by much (screen size may be a big factor though). If you want all the fancy graphical effects, get a machine with a discrete graphics chip. As if anyone is surprised by that! BTW: I prefer running my gaming rig with NVIDIA RTX2060 SUPER, 4K screen etc. for Second Life, of course I do. But when I'm not at the desk then the M1 MacBook is easily good enough to log on and join in the SL fun. Way better than my 5 year old MacBook Air. Don't let anyone convince you it will compete with a discrete graphics chip PC/laptop - it won't. However, I hope this is helpful in setting realistic expectations performance of SL on the M1. One final note - the Dell was running the fan full bore during all of this. The M1? Whisper quiet. Nice! Alise

Hi Pgr3123 Romano, I can understand your skepticism. I had really terrible frame rates on my MBP M1, even with the quality turned right down to minimum. I then tried some of the locations the guys in this post are showing, and I get the 30-50 fps they claim. It depends hugely on what is in the region. My home in Belissima is terrible, presumably due to loads of stuff in my house, the trees outside etc. However, I can easily get 60-70 fps in my Skybox, and 20-30 fps in my mainland preferred haunts. It really comes down to having to tune your settings for your location, not one-size-fits-all. Biggest factor is definitely draw distance. If you can cope with a short draw distance, you should get some pretty good frame rates. Generally, I'm pretty impressed with SL on the M1 MBP having upgraded from a pretty old MBA, but like others would welcome a native build. I guess it's early days yet. Cheers, Alise