observeur

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" )

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).

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.

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.

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.