Jamethiel Wickentower

Unfortunately, that particular viewer is even worse than the official viewer - sits there with the beach ball (and no, it's not my Internet connection - beachballing for 1 hour means it's definitely dead). DSL

Hi There, Well, this is a truly sad day; I did try to run the Windows Viewer on VMWare Fusion 5 under Windows 7 with little success. Over the weekend I spat the dummy at VMWare Fusion 5 and installed Parallels 8 and tried again. Here is the sad thing: My frame rate under Windows 7 in Parallels 8 with 3 virtual CPUs and 4GB of memory is at least comparable to that when running the OS X native client but most of the time better;Textures on prims actually rez in the Windows Viewer;The cache obviously works on the Windows Viewer - whilst it "may just be a problem between the monitor and the user" (i.e. I'm doing something wrong), I logged out of the OS X Viewer at Tempura island and back in and then waited a while whilst all the prims downloaded again (and yes, they were all downloading again - I have a self-run proxy between me and the Internet and I was watching the requests) - but on Windows, I log back in after having visited and kaboom it loads almost magically fastSomething is seriously wrong with the OS X viewer; my crude benchmarks are based on a totally unfair comparison, in that: When running the OS X Viewer I have no Parallels 8 running and only Safari (with no web pages) and my Apple Mail running (plus other applications) but when running the Windows viewer I have Parallels 8 running and Safari and my Apple Mail running;The OS X Viewer has full access to the hardware under OS X, no virtualisation layer and has access to all 8GB of memory, again not virtualised; The Windows Viewer has access to the hardware using Intel's virtualisation technology, needs to have Parallels act as arbiter for its memory and uses whatever Parallels uses to virtualise the file system; In other words, theoretically because I'm running Windows 7 and the Windows Viewer under Parallels 8 with an OS X host operating system...everything else being equal...I find it truly strange that the Windows Viewer does, effectively, run rings around the OS X viewerLet me hazard a guess or two: The OpenGL implementation on OS X is particularly bad (especially on ATI Radeons); orThe OpenGL implementation on OS X isn't that bad but the way the Viewer source communicates with it is particularly bad on OS X;Parallels 8 somehow avoids OS X's implementations and the DirectX or OpenGL on Windows is much better than Mac (this, by the way, wouldn't surprise me at all);The Viewer was written for Windows or all it is written to some set of abstractions, either way the infrastructure in the viewer favours Windows performanceAs an OS X user I'm used to being left behind on games performance but this is just silly and disappointing. JW Model Name:iMac Model Identifier:iMac11,1 Processor Name:Intel Core i7 Processor Speed:2.8 GHz Number of Processors:1 Total Number of Cores:4 L2 Cache (per Core):256 KB L3 Cache:8 MB Memory:8 GB Processor Interconnect Speed:4.8 GT/s Boot ROM Version:IM111.0034.B02 SMC Version (system):1.54f36 I'm running Windows 7 with the latest required patches.

Well, lo and behold, the newest official but non-dev, non-beta viewer (Second Life 3.1.0 (243176) Oct 16 2011 12:27:14 (Second Life Release)) manages to run without crashing. Hooray! I like some of the features in other viewers and Phoenix / Firestorm actually renders what it is able to render faster than Viewer 2. However, it wasn't until Viewer 2 turned up that prims actually loaded on Macs (I kid you not. You could be standing there looking at something and one prim would refuse to load - at all - then you'd switch to one of the other viewers [eg. emerald] and it was a perfectly fine construction). DSL

This version: Second Life 3.0.3 (240895) Sep 15 2011 14:05:01 (Second Life Release)Release Notes You are at 144679.0, 350553.0, 26.8 in Solace Bay located at sim3541.agni.lindenlab.com (216.82.19.148:13002)Second Life Server 11.09.23.241511Release Notes CPU: Intel® Core i7 CPU 860 @ 2.80GHz (2800 MHz)Memory: 8192 MBOS Version: Mac OS X 10.7.1 Darwin 11.1.0 Darwin Kernel Version 11.1.0: Tue Jul 26 16:07:11 PDT 2011; root:xnu-1699.22.81~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64Graphics Card Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD 4850 OpenGL Engine OpenGL Version: 2.1 ATI-7.4.10 libcurl Version: libcurl/7.21.1 OpenSSL/0.9.8q zlib/1.2.5 c-ares/1.7.1J2C Decoder Version: KDU v6.4.1Audio Driver Version: FMOD version 3.750000Qt Webkit Version: 4.7.1 (version number hard-coded)Voice Server Version: Vivox 3.2.0002.10426 Built with GCC version 40001Packets Lost: 8/1138 (0.7%) ...has been an utter and total pain for me. Here's been my story: 1. Install it. 2. It crashes with hard core CORES. 3. Report them to appple. 4. Restart. 5. OH DEAR IT NOW CRASHES ALL THE TIME. 6. Delete all my caches like ALL of them physically and summarily. 7. Go back to 5, do not pass GO. 8. Retrieve an earlier viewer from one of my other Macs. 9. Play around with that and hope to hell auto updater doesn't update me or I dont click an update. 10. Accidentally click an update: 11. Got back to 5. 12. Give SL2 the flick because I'm not paying LL for a full sim per month not to use it at all; I choose Phonix. 13. Funnily enough a non-SL viewer WORKS. 14. Out of morbid interest go back to SL2. 15. It works. The only thing I can think of is the servers crapped out OR Phoenix managed to fix SOMETHING so that SL2 didn't damn well crash. And before anyone has a go at me for sounding a tad cranky, I'm not one of the free users, I may not have as many sims as others but it would sort of help if "upgrades" didn't actually crash me out of the whole of SL. JW

Open up graphics settings. Set to max. Open up advanced. Click hardware skinning. Turn that on as well. Bring water reflections back down to 'static objects only'. Reduce particles to 4096. ... RenderAppleMultiGL is on. HTTP textures are on.

I have taken a look at it; at the moment I can't quite decide whether it is better. Switching viewers without also switching one's cache on Macs tends to confuse the texture caches. Then, it takes the viewer quite a while to recover (trust me, I am quite used to the various ways to convince textures to actually load on macs - let's put it this way, there are times when something 200m away will load perfectly but the board with a single, small texture right next to my avatar will stay resolutely gray). That said, let's just say Viewer 2.8 for the 10 minutes I looked at it -- I am meant to be studying -- gave me a frame rate of about 1-1.5 fps. 5-8 fps is sort of usable; not very mind you. But 1-1.5fps is a joke. However as noted in the previous paragraph I think this was more that the viewer got confused rather than it really was 1-1.5fps. JW

Hi There, I have two macs. Whilst the Mac I usually use (the 27" iMac with a Core i7/2.8Ghz and ATI4850) certainly outperforms my other Mac (the 24" iMac with a Core 2 Duo/2.8Gz and nVidia 880GS - it's a NOTEBOOK graphics card) when not running the new shaders for shadows, when I add the shaders in: The nVidia 8800GS runs my own sim at about 18-20 fpsThe ATI4850 runs my own sim at about 5-7 fps This is so disheartening. The machine with the ATI4850 was a top-of-the-line machine when I bought it. Now I know that the ATI cards in iMacs have always been problematic and it appears that the ATI cards regardless of Mac are not as well supported in SL but this is just silly. It annoys me that a LAPTOP quality 8800GS can outperform the ATi4850. Does anyone know anything about this? Yes, I know about the custom and advanced settings;Yes, Render Apple Multi GL is on JW