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.