Sorry Sappa....didn't see your message until now as I've been overseas.
I'm on an iMac. Running OS X 10.6.8 My graphics card is an ATI Radeon HD2600 The Secondlife Viewer spits out the following regarding OpenGL Version: 2.1 ATI-1.6.36
I've never had shadows (it's a Mac, after all...SL & Macs don't play nicely together in that regard) but until a few months ago, I had a good, stable connection & was able to function quite nicely on my high graphics settings. Now I'm reduced to the absolute basic settings & even then frequently have trouble with TPing & waiting for anything to load. It's effectively made the whole SL experience almost impossible. And nothing has changed with my hardware. Interesting that more & more people are having the same problems (although it'd be even more interesting if I could get it to work properly! lol). I also seem to be having more & more problem connecting to the secondlife website in a timely fashion. I wonder if they're having server issues?