Native Apple Silicon Support
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Alvi Halderman
I think Second Life for the first time ever has the opportunity of offering excellent performance to the mainstream with the incredible performance advancements of Apple Silicon. SL already works quite well on low-end M1 Macs, so I cannot imagine how much things could improve if it is supported natively.
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Christi Maeterlinck
Yes: let's get away from Intel and take advantage of the new Apple processors.
Jack90 Ormstein
Oh, I would really love this!
Spidey Linden
tracked
Issue accepted. We have no estimate when it may be implemented. Please see future release notes for this fix.
observeur Resident
Spidey Linden: That's some VERY good news !! Thank you :)
Jillx Resident
Spidey Linden Apple uses arm64 architecture since more than 3 years: I think that a lot of apple users are waiting for native viewer. I hope that Linden releases an arm64 version as soon as possible! It will be GREAT.
observeur Resident
I would like to see this coming. interestingly, there is a 3rd party viewer that has been compiled for Arm, it's called "megapahit" and is really a fork of the LL viewer (as it doesn't really add features, but it looks like a simple recompilation). The voice doesn't work, as they say they don't have the redistribution rights. other features seem to work properly. I mention this because it shows it's not such a big deal to recompile the viewer for Arm, and make it work, at least (beside maybe the voice plugin.. but i'm not sure if the issue is technical or a matter of distribution rights). From my really quick experience, this recompiled viewer wasn't showing huge gains in raw performance on a macbook M2 Pro (might benefit better Macbook Air M1 and M2 ..) but it was showing more consistent framerate, specially in a places with more crowd or more objects, as this is where the apple silicon macs struggle the most (way more than an equivalent PC in these cases).. partially due to the Rosetta translation that prevent proper specific code optimizations, but certainly also because of the absence of real support for OpenGL from Apple as they marked it as a deprecated API several years ago.
Edit 3 mars 2024:
Erik who leads the Megapahit viewer made nice progress already and the latest available build supports pretty much all the features of SL viewer (including emojis). The performance difference is now more perceptible in my case, the viewer is smoother than any other viewer on my macbook M2 pro, despite the fact the code hasn't been specifically optimized. The fps also see an important boost, between 1.5 up to 2X. Some issues remain (mostly stutter/lag issues in some particular cases or sims, that have been reported on this site and i have no doubt the LL team will find ways to solve them) that are common to all pbr viewer on macs with Apple silicon chips. I made this little update to demonstrate the viability of a native arm version of the viewer. Also i'm always happy to test things if LL needs me.
Coffee Pancake
The viewer code isn't the problem, the supporting libraries is a road block.
This may change when the viewer updates to vulkan.