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Second Life Viewer 4 on Mac OS X 10.11.2


davidventer
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Anyone else having extremely degraded performance with the lastest SL viewer on Mac OS X, or Macbook/iMac with Retina Display? I'm talking about really low frame-rates, jerking camera movement, frequent crashes, etc. 

If you are experiencing similar issues on Mac OS X with the default viewer, please add your voice here:
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-10674

If you have found a way to improve Second Life performance on Mac OS X, please share how...

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Jean Horten,

Nice of you to assume that I have insufficient hardware.

FYI: 

Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M OpenGL Engine

And let me guess; you're probably on a Windows or Linux machine, so this issue doesn't concern you, and you have no concept of what I am talking about. Troll much?

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davidventer wrote:

Jean Horten,

Nice of you to assume that I have insufficient hardware.

FYI: 

Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation

Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M OpenGL Engine

And let me guess; you're probably on a Windows or Linux machine, so this issue doesn't concern you, and you have no concept of what I am talking about. Troll much?

Realistically that GPU is mediocre for 3D gaming and the Retina display is forcing it to work much harder than it would at a lower resolution. Check out this article - and note that games ran quite a bit better on Windows instead of OSX on the same Apple hardware:

http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/03/macbook-pro-retina-display-windows-games/

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Guys, I don't think he was asking anyone to rate his OS and hardware, nor was he saying he intends to play Fallout 4 on max settings or anything crazy like that using his Macintosh. To quote the original post "Anyone else having extremely degraded performance with the lastest SL viewer." This part of the post is implying that it ran fine on the same hardware (regardless of what hardware) before the 4.0.0 update, and after it went bad.

 

davidventer, to answer your question yes I have an iMac with that exact same video card (Nvidia 650M) that was doing the exact same thing you are describing in your post, where it ran perfectly fine before the update. What fixed it for me was to reformat it so as to go back to Yosemite. I was reformatting it to go back to Yosemite to resolve an unrelated issue, but it did indeed resolve this issue. Not sure if it was going back to Yosemite from El Capitan that fixed it, or some sort of setting issue that reformatting by itself fixed. But regardless the issue is now gone for me and it works as it should for me at this point in time on my iMac. Hope this helps =)

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I'm now on OS X 10.11.3 Public Beta 1, and I can't even run the default SL viewer without crashing 5-10secs after logging on (unless I log in to the sky or an empty water sim, then the viewer doesn't insta-crash). Firestorm 32bit is also crashy. However, Firestorm 64bit seems to be working, albeit with slower performance than the default SL viewer, but at least it doesn't crash, repeatedly.

It seems like Firestorm 64bit is my only option right now. Guess I'll just have to suck it up and get used to the terrible, projectile-vomit inducing visual disaster that is the Firestorm UI, for now. I'd rather use Alchemy than Firestorm, but Alchemy is just as crashy as the default viewer right now, and missing many of the latest features and improvements from Linden Lab. Here's hoping that the Alchemy dev team will release an update soon, or that Linden Lab will fix their crashy mess so that I can stop using Uglystorm because, eww.

 

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Jean Horten wrote:

Having  to reformat your expensive MAC and downgrade the whole OS to an older version to get back your gpu performance definitively proves the supremacy of OSX.

J.

Having to troll the forums and resort to insulting other's choice of tech gadgets to pass the time, without providing any useful or constructive feedback related to the actual topic, definitively proves the supremacy of Jean Horten.

 

D.

</sarcasm>

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Theresa Tennyson wrote:


davidventer wrote:

Jean Horten,

Nice of you to assume that I have insufficient hardware.

FYI: 

Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation

Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M OpenGL Engine

And let me guess; you're probably on a Windows or Linux machine, so this issue doesn't concern you, and you have no concept of what I am talking about. Troll much?

Realistically that GPU is mediocre for 3D gaming and the Retina display is forcing it to work much harder than it would at a lower resolution. Check out this article - and note that games ran quite a bit better on Windows instead of OSX
on the same Apple hardware:


My system was running SL just fine before the Viewer 4 update, and now once again it's fine on Firestorm X64... This is NOT a hardware issue. And FYI, I play other games just fine, too, with great performance, not to mention my system specs far exceeds SL's system requirements. This is not about hardware; it's about software issues with the default SL Viewer 4 on the latest Mac OS X.

I'm sure all Mac users can agree that Linden Lab has been neglecting Mac viewer improvements. Mac OS X has changed A LOT in the past couple of years and Linden Lab simply haven't been keeping up to date with all the changes because, they either don't have an experienced dedicated Mac developer team, or for some reason they feel that it would be simply too much work to re-write the viewer for Mac using the latest standards, API's and rendering systems from Apple. 

 

Think of it this way: It's like trying to play a video tape in a DVD player.

But that said, let me repeat myself again: SL was running just fine until very recently. So far, the only solution I've found is to use a 64bit 3rd party viewer. If anyone else knows of any other solutions or ways to improve SL performance on Mac, please share...

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davidventer wrote:

My system was running SL just fine before the Viewer 4 update

It seems as if there are a whole host of Mac problems here, all confounding each other -- or at least, that's how it comes across in the jira. Studying that jira entry, though, I think some of it is just unnecessary confusion: I don't think this has anything to do with the SL viewer update to 4.0 -- the jira is much older than that -- so that could lead astray folks who know SL viewer 4.0 is all about replacing the obsolete WebKit browser framework with Chromium Embedded Framework.

Personally I don't have the first clue how to diagnose or resolve the actual problem here, but I'd recommend revising the jira to express the various SL viewers that have been affected over time (which admittedly can be deduced from sleuthing deeply into the entry's History).

(... or maybe you're saying that the rest of the jira history is unrelated bunk and now the SL 4.0 viewer is all that matters -- which fits the datum that Firestorm is working, because it won't yet have any of LL's new CEF code. But... is that what you're saying? if so, maybe turn off media and see if the regular viewer is okay without Search, embedded browser, and maybe other internal browser-based UIs that I forget now.)

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davidventer wrote:



My system was running SL just fine before the Viewer 4 update, and now once again it's fine on Firestorm X64... This is NOT a hardware issue. And FYI, I play other games just fine, too, with great performance, not to mention my system specs far exceeds SL's system requirements. This is not about hardware; it's about software issues with the default SL Viewer 4 on the latest Mac OS X.


So it was some other davidventer who wrote this on the Firestorm JIRA?

 
davidventer added a comment - 11/Nov/15, 11:12 AM +0100 - edited

I'm running OS X El Capitan 10.11.2 Beta (15C31f) and ALL SL viewers are extremely slow and crashy. I never ever see more than 8FPS no matter which viewer or graphic settings I use. This is not a Firestorm issue. Linden Lab needs to start using Metal instead of OpenGL in the main viewer codebase! We all need to **bleep** in the official Second Life Jira about this!

Macs have been having issues with SL for quite a while. Many have been having issues since the viewer was updated to use Cocoa. Others with Nvidia graphics have been having problems since El Capitan. If using a 64 bit 3rd party viewer works? Use the 64 bit 3rd party viewer. Yes, it'll take them a while to update to CEF.

MAAAYYYBEEE it would have been a good idea to not update your OS to a new version containing extensive graphics updates until it was shaken out for a while.

Mac users are a niche market within the niche market of SL and it isn't realistic to expect a lot of Mac-specific attention. However, the source code is right here; have at it.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Get_source_and_compile

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  • 5 weeks later...

Firestorm version 4.7.5.47975 64 bit runs like an absolute dream for me at the highest performance levels (with some degradation in overworked sim venues with many avatars present.

OS X El Capitan Version 10.11.3
3.5 GHz Intel Core i7, 16GB Memory 1600 MHz DDR3, NIVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4096 MB ( not Retina Display)

Note: Also have a newish 15" Mac Pro laptop with retina Display that gets excellent framerates at medium settings.

 

 

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Granted this IMac has pretty hi specs, it runs SL at high levels day in and day out without a flaw. I don't even remember the last time I crashed Firestorm. The macbook pro 15" runs sl better than I would have imagined. At medium levels it actually runs quite smoothly. I also have a mac mini, hooked up to a big tv screen. I've tried sl on it, but its specs are not great and not really an adequate machine for sl.

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  • 2 months later...


Laurent Vesta wrote:


Jean Horten wrote:

Having  to reformat your expensive MAC and downgrade the whole OS to an older version to get back your gpu performance definitively proves the supremacy of OSX.

J.

Don't you have something better to do than trolling those lame forums?

No, actually not, it's fun to get insulted by fanatic irrrational apple disciples.

J.

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