Anyone tried Apple MacOS Sierra with SL Viewer yet?

[Loco Mycron]

Interested to hear if anyone has tried running SecondLife Viewer on Apple MacOS Sierra (MacOS 10.12).

Anyone out there given it a go yet?

[Whirly Fizzle]

I'm not a Mac user myself but I have friends using Sierra & being on the Firestorm support team we get to hear about problems with OS updates pretty quickly.

The Sierra update seems to be going fairly smoothly so far with respect to SL viewers.

The only known problem so far with Sierra is that media is much slower to load.  This is affecting times for movies to start to play and slower then normal loading of web profiles and web search in the viewer.  This affects both the LL viewer and Firestorm - probably all SL viewers.

There is a bug report filed for that problem here: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-40552

On the plus side the Mac file picker crash appears to have been fixed in Sierra, probably because Sierra removed the Coverflow option. So the viewer will no longer crash when browsing files through the file picker - when uploading or saving to disk, so this workaround is no longer necessary - http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/mac_crash_upload

The known problem that started in El Capitan on Nvidia Macs with the Mac viewers often crashing in the Apple Nvidia driver is not fixed in Sierra unfortunately. Those affected wil still need to switch over to using the Nvidia web drivers.

There is a bug report filed for that here: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-10302

[Loco Mycron]

Thank you Whirly for your helpful response and the Jira links, much appreciated

[Gavin Hird]

It works, but there is a slowness initializing html content, meaning it takes a bit before content in the login screen shows, and the same if you open the internal web browser. Otherwise it runs reasonably well.

In areas of moderate to high mesh content the GPU will spontaneously reset and the viewer will crash when shadows are turned on. This sould only happen if you have a NVIDIA GPU in your Mac. This also happens on 10.11 and is a known bug reported to LL a year ago. They have to fix the rendering code. 

The latest builds of the Kokua viewer works too. There should be a release version in a day or two.  

 

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

Installed Sierra at the weekend, everything was fine until this morning. It doesn't like one store thats always been a lag monster. Taking it slowly to enter sort of worked, till it didn't. Switching to wireframe worked even better. Like no lag. And I could still see where the MM boards were. Not what's on them, or any of the vendor boards....

For the moment at least this work around is amusing me.

And whirly, if you wonder about a series of repeated crashes on your log reports this morning, that may have just been me, trying out different combinations of things to look for a less permanent workaround than changing drivers. :matte-motes-smile:

Lowest complexity settings and LoD = 0 may help too.

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

Not working anymore. Cannot figure out why it did, then didn't. The nvidia site wasn't easy to negotiate at all, but finally found a compatible driver with "mac sierra" in the site search. Time to try inworld again, fingers crossed.

Am curious if this will adversely affect my computer's overall performance, especially on things other than SL.

[cleome Jewell]

I lost SL about a month ago when older viewers were disallowed.I have a IMac os10 2 yrs old. I then downloaded MOS sierra and n0 difference,. I deleted all SL viewers, all applications, and did a clean sweep. Work times 2 but avatar not right. Inventory unuseable. Oh yes downloaded a fresh sL viewer. I have been in SL for 9 years and am so depressed. I do not think the creators told us that Macs do not work with this new viewer. I have tried other alternate viewers support guided me to. I think only PC's work. I too need help with a fix on my Mac. If anyone can help, would help all of SL. with love, cleome jewell

 

[Whirly Fizzle]

What actually goes wrong when you run the viewer?  Can you give more details?

If you can get as far as the login screen, in the top menu bar of the viewer, go to Help -> About Second Life, click the copy to clipboard button & paste all your system information here.

You can also file a support ticket with LL support at https://support.secondlife.com/create-case/

[CassieMaia]

I have a MacBook Pro, mid-2012, with Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 MB,  and I updated to MaxOS Sierra last week.  I've had sucess after the upgrade running the SL viewer, Firestorm viewer and Alchemy viewer.

[DeeKate]

I've updated to Sierra about a week ago and both the viewers I got, Firestorm and Singularity, have become since really unstable ... I crash all the time and in particular when I tp from a sim to another. Almost tempted to give up SL.

[Loco Mycron]

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DeeKate wrote:

I've updated to Sierra about a week ago and both the viewers I got, Firestorm and Singularity, have become since really unstable ... I crash all the time and in particular when I tp from a sim to another. Almost tempted to give up SL.

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Which model Mac are you using DeeKate, and which graphics card?

[Gavin Hird]

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Loco Mycron wrote:

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DeeKate wrote:

I've updated to Sierra about a week ago and both the viewers I got, Firestorm and Singularity, have become since really unstable ... I crash all the time and in particular when I tp from a sim to another. Almost tempted to give up SL.

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Which model Mac are you using DeeKate, and which graphics card?

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It does not really matter what Mac or graphics card you have.The issue is that the Mac version of viewer is programmed for OpenGL 2.1, which makes it increasinly incompatible with macOS since 10.11 and compounded in 10.12. We know exactly where the viewer crash down to the exact source line of code, but Linden Lab needs to rewrite the renderer to fixit. Nobody else has the competence to do this. 

In addition the SL plugin andother viewer components use code that Apple stopped supporting 4 major system versions back. 

[DeeKate]

Does this mean that I can take a (possibly long) leave from SL?

[Gavin Hird]

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DeeKate wrote:

Does this mean that I can take a (possibly long) leave from SL?

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It does not mean you have to elave SL, but you probably have to turn off shadows, in combination with reducing draw distance and lowering mesh quality in the Graphics Preferences tab. It will take a bit of trial and error to figure out what works best with your computer. Having shadwos turned on will crash your viewer at some point. 

[Loco Mycron]

Thanks for the info and tips Gavin

[ZohrehQ]

Yes and it crashes even more!

[Pamela Galli]

All of which is why I have never upgraded beyond Yosemite.

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

So I installed the most recent nvidia driver I could find, all was working well. A few days ago, Apple gave me a new driver on an update. (I didn't realise this was what the update was, otherwise I wouldn't have agreed to it.) Hadn't done much moving around in SL until today when it was doing that graphics overload crash thing again.

Tried to reinstall the driver I used before. It is now incompatible.

http://www.nvidia.co.uk/download/driverResults.aspx/107851/en-uk

The nvidia website says this:

"CUDA Application Support:
In order to run macOS Applications that leverage the CUDA architecture of certain NVIDIA graphics cards, users will need to download and install a compatible CUDA driver. CUDA driver which supports macOS Sierra 10.12 will be available at a later date."

Anyone else run into this problem? Any suggestions for a work around? (Sierra, nvidia GeForce graphics card. Everything is fine except SL.)

eta viewers used: Firestorm was dreadful. Cool Viewer was cludgy, if I was in a graphics intense area I could move once per log in. SL Viewer, bad in a mesh/graphics intense area. OK standing around a very quiet shop and at home. Turned everything off shadow wise.

[Gavin Hird]

For every iteration of macOS the rendering code in the Mac version of any viewer gets more and more incompatible with macOS, because Linden Lab does nothing to update the very outdated code that exist in the macOS version of the LL viewer. The same code is use by every third party viewer.

The reason why the NVIDIA driver also gets more outdated / hard to update is that Apple is replacing more and more funtionality of the graphics drivers with their own METAL code, at the expense of OpenGL, which they have not updated for quite some time. 

So unless Linden Lab manage to write a METAL renderer, it will most likely continue to get worse. They are in the market for a rendering engineer, preferably with METAL experience, but I don't know if the position has been filled. Such a person is most likely very expensive to hire. 

I can show you exactly where in the code the viewers will crash, and why you have to turn off occlusion / shadows for the viewer to be stable (I am the maintainer of the Mac version of the Kokua viewer.) I am not in a position to be able to rewrite the renderer, however. 

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

Any advice on what to do? I'd really rather not lose SL, but this isn't a great time to buy a new computer and I have absolutely no reason to other than SL. Am feeling rather lost and stressed about it.

[Gavin Hird]

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Bitsy Buccaneer wrote:

Any advice on what to do? I'd really rather not lose SL, but this isn't a great time to buy a new computer and I have absolutely no reason to other than SL. Am feeling rather lost and stressed about it.

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The only thing you currently can do is lower your graphics settings to a point where the viewer is stable. 

You may want to make different presets for different areas you are in, so you can easily switch between them. One setting may work in your home, but will crash the GPU (and the viewer) if you go to a mesh heavy area, or a crowded club. 

Depending on how much graphics memory yopur Mac has, you may also experiment with the texture memory slider. The setting should be preserved as part of a preset.

I am sorry for all the Mac users who feel this pain right now. 

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

Thanks Gavin. I pushed everything down as low as possible, except mesh at 1, turned off OpenGL Vertex Buffer Object and lowered texture mem to 256. Still lagging like it's 2008. :matte-motes-confused: Didn't crash, but movement is shall we say impratical and I didn't really push it. This is so stupid. A not quite four year old desktop with reasonable/good specs is essentially obsolete for SL. And running on 2008 settings is so gonna help with making things that look good for other people.

[Krystal Iridescent]

I am surprised that nobody has recommended Alchemy Viewer yet?  I have run it for at least two years on my Macbook Pro mid 2012 model and now that I updated to Sierra, it is still by far the best viewer to use.  I only use mid graphics anyway (unless I am photographing) and am quite happy to up and down my draw distance as needed.   I always disable atmospheric shaders and ambient occlusion anyway as I dislike them but I still keep the basic shaders on.   I am a creator as well as a sim owner and Alchemy does me just fine.  Try it and see?

[Gavin Hird]

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Krystal Iridescent wrote:

I am surprised that nobody has recommended Alchemy Viewer yet?  I have run it for at least two years on my Macbook Pro mid 2012 model and now that I updated to Sierra, it is still by far the best viewer to use.  

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Depeding on your Macbook Pro model it may only have Intel graphics, and is therefore not affected. Macs with descrete grapichs (and some of them also have Intel graphics in addition) will also crash the Alcmehy viewer in the same manner as the other viewers.  

Turning on Ambient Occlusion will crash the viewer as the crash happens in the occlusion code overwriting memory in the GPU leading to a GPU reset. Turning on shadows will accomplish the same, but usually faster the busier the scene is. 

[Pussycat Catnap]

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Gavin Hird wrote:

 

In areas of moderate to high mesh content the GPU will spontaneously reset and the viewer will crash when shadows are turned on. This sould only happen if you have a NVIDIA GPU in your Mac. This also happens on 10.11 and is a known bug reported to LL a year ago. They have to fix the rendering code.

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Is this official viewer specific?

My Macbook has an nVidea card and I actually switched to Firestorm earlier in 2016 because the official viewer kept crashing and I had no idea why. Its been pretty stable on Firestorm... But my MacBook is still on 10.11

My iMac has a Radeon card, and is on Sierra, and has been stable in Firestorm.