Reading Radar

I have a confession. I’ve never really settled for second rate computers. I used to build my own PC’s, and prior to that I upgraded regularly. Now that I have all Macs, I upgrade fairly regularly now too. My primary computer is a Macbook Pro Core 2 Duo 2.5 GHz (Penryn) with 4 GB of RAM and Nvidia 8600M GT with 512 MB of VRAM. I have a quad-core Mac Pro with 2 2.66 GHz dual core Xeon processors, 4 GB of RAM, and ATI X1900 graphics with 512 MB of VRAM. These machines are not slouches. They may not have the best graphics cards available at any price, but they should be able to handle Second Life without complaining too much. And they do.. kind of. But in some ways it’s getting more painful instead of less painful.

People who don’t have Macs don’t know what we mean when we say “I was having a beachball” (some people call it a pinwheel). It means the App or sometimes the Finder is doing something that causes it to become temporarily non-responsive. It’s kind of like the windows hourglass or the Vista “ring”. I think I got that right - I’ve hardly ever used Vista, so any mistakes there are unintentional. Please no angry emails about how little I know about Vista - I already know how little I know, and I don’t care. Write your own blog post. Anyway.. when you beachball in SL, a lot of fun things can happen. If you are flying, you might wind up at the sim edge, underwater, up at 4000 m, or any combination thereof, when you return from your little vacation. The other night, Chug and I went to Harmony Island for a Jaycatt and Frogg event, and I wound up walking off the venue and into someone’s house. I “came to” in their kitchen. I have no clue how I got in - maybe they have phantom walls? I don’t know.

Here’s me flying along as normal over Podcaster Island…

Here’s me beachballing, sure to wind up at the sim edge or crashing into something when I return to normalcy (NOTE: beachball enlarged for dramatic effect - too bad it’s not spinning like the real thing, eh?)…

During these beachballs, the whole SL UI freezes - the image stops still, you can’t type any chat, nothing updates in the SL window until it’s done. This makes doing anything, including sitting and talking to someone, a real bitch. Forget about flying or driving. And currently, I’m getting these in 1.19.1.4 every 2 - 5 minutes, for sometimes up to a minute long.

Ok, so I was hoping 1.20.0 might bring some relief. And sure enough, I don’t have the beachballs. And it’s compatible with the 3dconnexion SpaceNavigator, which should be arriving this morning, which will make machinima and building better than ever. Only one problem. 1.20.0 locks up my Mac. The whole thing. The Finder becomes non-responsive. I can’t switch to other programs, shut down, restart… nothing. All I can do is press the power button until the puter shuts down. Unix systems don’t like that - actually no modern OS does. They page stuff off or leave it in memory and commit it to disk later. It’s not wise to shut down like that a lot. Plus, even if it was the best thing you could do for your computer, it makes that version of SL even more useless on the Mac than the beachballing one.

When I first got into SL, it was my low end Mac holding me back. I had a mini with integrated graphics. Yuck. Never, never, NEVER run any computer with integrated graphics if you want to have even a passable SL experience. Seriously. I got killed in katana fights every time. I guess 3 fps vs someone getting 24 fps or more is not gonna win. But now… Now SL is holding me back. Or Apple’s OpenGL drivers for Nvidia. Or both. Granted, when Apple first started using the Nvidia 8600M GT in the Macbook Pro laptops, it was worse. The thing would just lose memory until the whole computer locked up - at least now I can run 1.19.1.4 and just deal with the beachballs. 1.20.0 gets kind of “memory laneish” but it’s not due to any memory leaks or anything like it used to be. Something else is going on.

I’m not really sure what the point of this post is, except to say, it sucks being on any of my high-end Macs and being in SL these days. It’s just NOT a good experience. And I really don’t know if I have high hopes for any fixes anytime soon, without some other new problem being introduced. I really don’t. So for now, I’ll avoid driving, flying, any activity that requires the ability to avoid beachballs for long periods of time. Wait, that includes conversations… ok, umm. It was nice talking to you…