[opensource-dev] ATI vs NV vs OSX

Trilo Byte trilobyte550m at gmail.com
Wed May 11 11:24:41 PDT 2011


Caveat - shadows are still in the experimental stages at LL, even moreso on the Mac (as I understand it, the team doing that work within LL has little to no access to Mac hardware for testing and experimentation).

Shadows currently work on nVidia Macs with the following GPU's: GeForce 9400m, GeForce 9600m GT, GT-120, GT-320M, GT-330M, and GTX-285.  The Quadro 4000 supports shadows when running the Windows SL client under boot camp or even in the Parallels virtual machine, but not reliably on the Mac client.  I've heard mixed reports about shadows working on the GeForce 8800GT.  

They do not work yet on any ATI Mac when running the Mac client, though there are plans to fix that at some point.  It is not a case of waiting on a change in drivers on Apple's end, but changes and improvements to the code on LL's end.  Since the team involved with getting that moving are also the same folks tasked with working on mesh (an understandably higher priority project), it's moving slowly.  Then add the stuff I mentioned in the caveat (it's still considered experimental which makes it 'back-burner' status, plus they don't have the proper equipment to be able to test and experiment internally).

From a hardware and OS/driver/OpenGL standpoint, both nVidia and ATI's hardware are more than capable of doing the job under either version of the OS (the professional 3D rendering apps don't seem to have any trouble with shadows, depth of field, or global illumination on any reasonably powerful card), the issue is in the SL application code.

On May 11, 2011, at 12:20 AM, Marc Adored wrote:

> So I am building a machine we shall call it a haxintosh... It will be
> running OSX I was just wondering if ATI or Nvidia was better supported
> for SecondLife on OSX? I know OSX chose ATI for there machines but
> does SL support it or would I be better off to get Nvidia anyways? I
> really want everything shadows lighting all that. Ive seen issues on
> OSX for some people but I dont know if its ATI or SL's problems with
> the os directly. I know this is the opensource dev list but I figured
> you guys would know this stuff better then anyone being in the
> trenches and all :P
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