SL / Mac benchmarks...

Sunday, 20 April 2008 08:06

Here is a notecard I recieved from Da5id Kronfeld in the macintosh users group in SL.

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I'm currently doing tests to determine the difference in behaviour of the SL client running in OS X and XP ( via boot camp ) on the same hardware. When I asked on the Mac Users group if anyone was interested in the results, the response was so overwhelming that it was suggested that I write up a notecard with my findings and give it to the group owner so that a group announcement could be made.

Round one:
20" iMac
2.0 GHz
2GB RAM
ATI Radeon 2400 XT with 128 MB

Graphics Settings:
Recommended defaults ( mediumish ) except that I set the draw distance to 128m and turned on multi-threaded rendering.

OS: 10.5.2 with all updates/Win XP SP2 with all updates.

This is not a power user's system. My time with the system ( it's not mine ) is limited, but I should be able to get 2 weeks with it in May. Then I can do more compressive tests.

The test was run in the Svarga sim. In each test I walked and flew through the same areas for about 20 minutes and took note of the frames per second ( fps ).

The results:

In XP frame rate varied from about 12fps - 18fps.
In OS X frame rate started at about 15-16 fps *but* periodically dropped to about 7fps for seemingly random periods of time. There were also short periods of "beach ball" pauses. This did *not* seem to be related to location. It may be worth noting that I see similar behaviour on my MBP.

Conclusion:

Subjectively, SL in XP seemed smoother and less prone to lag/hangs. I like to be in SL while doing a bunch of other stuff in other spaces, so dual booting wouldn't work for me. The SL experience in OS X on that computer, while somewhat laggy, was not so much worse that I'd dual boot, unless I were planning to be doing SL exclusively for some period of time.

Future:

I intend to do some more comprehensive tests on the iMac when I can get some more time with the iMac.

I'm also planning to test this on my MBP sometime in the next couple of weeks.

Please feel free to contact me with comments and/or suggestions.

Da5id Kronfeld