Blender + Mac OSX Leopard - Will it work?

[Oli4000]

devroo, Thanks for the link to the optimized build. Ran it on a Mac Mini but no improvement at all.

This sucks big time. I've been using Blender for quite a long time (10-11 years or so, don't even remember exactly. Way before the .org era) and this is the first time I'm really disappointed. Since 3 years Blender is one of my professional tools and the way it's performing now on Leopard it is totally useless for that purpose. Until this time I've never considered Blender being open source as a problem, but after waiting for a month for something stupid as support for an OS update (or new OpenGL version, if you like) is way too long.

[oenvoyage]

yes thanks devroo for the great build, it has those cool new features, but still the same display slowdown problems :-(
but i heard an update of osx 10.5.2 should come soon, i just hope apple heard my call.
blender works ok under windows using parallels desktop ... but not a viable solution
o

[ozawa3106]

Apple is reported to have asked that its developers focus the majority of their testing efforts on about a dozen core system components such as Audio Input, Bluetooth, the Finder, Graphics Drivers and Spotlight. http://www.appleinsider.com/articles..._5_2_seed.html

Hope the problem is solved in 10.5.2

[davidlandwehr]

I just tried 10.5.2 and Apple have done nothing for getting blender to work on Intel. It works under windows and on other kind of Mac OS X so it is clearly a driver bug (looks like the fragment shader kicks in and shades part of blender's interface). Apple does not care. I didn't pay extra for some hardware I could run Windows XP on so Apple where can I get a refund?

[yocoim]

Yep, me too - just installed 10.5.2 ... in vain. For the record, I've got a 3100 graphics chipset on my MacBook. Hopefully the next release, either from Blender or Apple will work ... finally.

[shongshong]

yep... me too!
black macbook, 2 GHz with version 10.5.2

No change!

Id like to blame it on apple like what everyone says but blender is the only application with driver problems throughout the entire history of leopard

[yocoim]

I just tried using Windows XP emulated by Parallel and it is definitly faster than native MacOsX, although slower than when I was on Tiger.

Anyone knows when is the next release of Blender due? And wether this bug is likely to be fixed?

[+peter]

for those on Macbooks who just updated to 10.5.2, did you also due the subsequent graphics update after 10.5.2?

If you run system update again, you will see a "update Leopard graphics drivers" or something.

That update appears to have fixed the frame flickering problems I had with some of the SVN builds on my MBP.

[shongshong]

Damn!
I got and installed that graphics update that showed up after the 10.5.2 update and still no avail!
Theres got to be a fix to this somehow!

[oenvoyage]

i also updated, as well as leopard graphic driver... but still no evolution :-(
a small idea but i am not a programmer, but is it possible to have a "temporary" non openGL blender for those having the problem ? or a kind of dirty fix by not calling the problematic opengl commands?
again i am not programmer i would not be surprised if it is not possible, just throwing ideas :-)
my openGL drivers says i am 1.5.6, is blender using opengl syntax of higher version?

[SirDude]

I posted this in the developer forums about this issue:
If I launch blender with the GLprofiler and in the launch settings change it to use
software rendering the slowness goes away.

I haven't quite figured out how to use the profiler yet but I'm guessing it would be
useful to apple for someone to run it on blender and find out where things are crapping out.

I'm going to see if I can't figure out how to use it, but if anyone else knows how its probably what we need to do to get this fixed.

[davidlandwehr]

I have opened a bug at Apple and I have noticed that others have done this as well (from posts in this forum). If it is report by more people Apple should give it some attention.

[yocoim]

Hi Sirdude,

Could you detail how to do that please? (i.e. launch Blender with software rendering?)

[Nitronic755]

Hey,

I have been having the same lag on Blender with my MacBook. Black MacBook, 2GHz, running Blender 2.45. Impossibly slow on Leopard, very good on XP through VMware Fusion.

[Oli4000]

I ran software update on my Mac Mini 2.0 Ghz and after the graphics update Blender does seem to run a little better. Editing meshes isn't as slow as before, although menus still freeze for 2 or 3 seconds before they respond. So it's still useless

[Mogwai]

Hi all,

From the idea of SirDude to run Blender through OpenGL Profiler, I juste managed to get it to run correctly on my Macbook with a GMA950. Juste do the following :

* Install the developper kit (XCode) and run the OpenGL Profiler located in /Developper/Applications/Graphics Tools
* Add Blender to the application list
* In the launch settings, enable "Use custom pixel format" and click the "Edit..." button
* In the window that should have appeared, click "Attributes" and then double click kCGLPFADoubleBuffer to add it to the list. Leave the value to 0.
* Start Blender by clicking the "Launch" button in the main window.

It shoud now run flawlessly. It looks like the double buffer is buggy with the new drivers, and disabling it solves the lag problem in Blender.

Just try it and let me know if it works for you too

[lukep]

hmm. weird that it solves the problem.

It is proof that it is a driver problem (note that the methods blender use are officially deprecated, but they still should work).

Now, does it slow the interface ? check also if both sculpt with partial update and lasso work

[Oli4000]

@Mogwai

Works! Does it work only if when Blender is launched from the profiler?

The 3D viewport is somewhat slow but finally the interface is usable with this workaround

[davidlandwehr]

Mogwai you are a hero!

I think the problem is that the Intel cards is running out of resources and some kind of defaulting routine is kicking in which is the reason the UI becomes unresponsive. This could be because the double buffer takes a lot of resource (and we only have the problem in Leopard because the entire user interface is in OpenGL). I made a build of blender where I disabled double buffering and everything works reasonable well (you can download it from here http://landwehr.dk/blender.zip which is a trunk build so be prepared...).

If I'm right and this is a resource problem we have problems since it is not a driver problem but a limitation in hardware something Apples is unlikely to be able to solve!

There is some anti-aliasing in the build going on when the menu goes away but no problems otherwise. Very large multi-res seems to be a problem.

Well thanks to you Mogwai I now have a working blender. Thanks!

[lukep]

Davidlandwher, what did you do exactly ?

suppress AGL_DOUBLEBUFFER from sPreferredFormatWindow[8] in GHOST_WindowCarbon ?

Check selections are still working especially things like lasso
Check partial updates in sculpt

I'm a bit amazed that blender work at all in a single buffer configuration, or Quartz do an amazing job of copying to the backbuffer when trying drawing to frontbuffer