Blender Problems with Mac OS 10.4.3 update?!

Khnum

I recently upgraded my system to the latest MacOS System update, 10.4.3, and litterally, right after restart and since, Blender has become so slow that it's completely unusable. I have no clue why it is acting this way but I wanted to see if ANYONE else is having this problem, or if it's isolated to just my machine.

What it's doing exactly is that on startup, each subdivision of the blender window "renders" on the screen very slowly, almost looks like it's materializing. Then once all the subwindows are rendered to the screen the main application spash shows up like it normally does and then the whole blender enviornment starts to refresh, and the process starts again.

Something that used to take fractions of a second to render on screen are now taking many seconds, and has made editing of any kind impossible due to lag of constant entire enviornemt refresh. ANY ideas or similar experiences would be nice to hear. Thanks a bunch in advance for your replys!!!!

Life_Span

I upgraded to 10.4.3 earlier this week, but haven't run into any problems using 2.40alpha. I haven't tried 2.37a since upgrading OSX.

I have noticed a problem if I try to use Yafray with 2.40alpha. I don't get a render, but Yafray continues to run in the background, eating up about 50% of my CPU cycles. I have to open a terminal window to kill it. Could it be that you have several Yafray "jobs" running and bogging down your system?

Ryan

osxrules

Try emptying your system caches.

If you download CLIX http://rixstep.com/4/0/clix/ from here:

ftp://rixstep.com/pub/CLIX.tar.bz2

and open the default command list (file>open then choose default.clix), scroll down to caches clean and run the command. Then restart because you have removed the system caches and they will need to be replaced - this means a longer boot up.

One time my caches got screwed and it made things go slow but it was all my caches and not just Blender. If you don't like the command line, you can download cocktail, which has a GUI tool to do the same thing. That app supposedly has security issues but that only really concerns the paranoid.

What graphics card do you have btw? There seems to be a problem with the GeForce 3 and GeForce 4Ti drivers under 10.4.3 that can significantly reduce performance. If you have one of those cards, you will have to wait for a driver update or do an archive and install back to 10.4.2.

Khnum

The video card installed is a GeForce4 MX 32mb nVIDIA
The machine is a dual G4 867Mhz PowerMac w/ 768Mb of memory.

Will try the Cocktail app see what happens, Thanks a bunch for the replies.

lukep

For all who have problems with last tiger update, i have opened a bug with apple which they classified as serious.

but i need more info. please PM me some details :

- exact symptoms constated
- your exact computer/card configuration

your email adress so i can contact you back.

i will then request from each config, a configuration report that i will forward to Apple

This is important as the more detailed the report, the sooner we can get a correction

Khnum

@ Lukep
I've PM'd you my hardware specs, let me know if there is anything else you need.

I tried the cache clearing and that still did nothing for me. Perhaps it IS the videocard driver, in which case I can't play with blender at work any more, maybe that's a good thing :P But, hopefully there is a realatively easy fix for this.

lukep

Quote:

Originally Posted by Khnum

@ Lukep
I've PM'd you my hardware specs, let me know if there is anything else you need.

got nothing from you

Khnum

lol, well there was an error on my part, pm should be to you now…

Burritoboy

Having same problems on a 12" G4 PB. Geforce FX 4 MX card.

Lukep, I'll send details, some time today. I'll do a few obvious things first.

Thanks.

BB

Burritoboy

For everyone's information.

Try it in full screen. Hit the green button without going via zoom from the upper finder menu pulldown.

That seems to get it working at least.

BB

sten

MX versions of the nvidia cards haven't been the best choice of hardware I guess...I once loaded Blender on my brothers computer (PC) having a GF 440 MX and I got some OpenGL artifacts in 3D view where the mesh looked torned apart, so I wonder, does these cheap GFX boards have full OpenGL compability (100%) ??? I do wonder...and as I can notice MacOSX is perfect platform for using OpenGL, but if the drivers aren't perfected for such low cost GFX...what is the cost in performances?

...and why is Apple shipping their computers with such low perfomance GFX boards when they say they put lots of quality in their hardware? that's a big question for me...and their computers aren't very cheap either, strange... :-?

William

I have had some issues with the 10.4.3 update. After the update, the render window no longer renders 'live' so you can see how it progresses. Also, sometimes the UI becomes completely unresponsive, and I have to quit and reopen Blender to get it back to the former state.

One tip though: I've found that Blenders runs alot better if the dock is set to hide itself... Odd.

Burritoboy

Quote:

Originally Posted by ztonzy

...and why is Apple shipping their computers with such low perfomance GFX boards when they say they put lots of quality in their hardware? that's a big question for me...and their computers aren't very cheap either, strange... :-?

It's a revison A one, got it about 3 months after they were introduced in Aprl 2003. Geforce 4 was pretty standard over 2 and a half years ago. Later models got better cards, ATI 9700 IIRC. GL performance is actually better in blender 2.37 than it was a year earlier.

So far it's outlasted every other lappy I've had, hinge, battery, keyboard, chassis all as good as the day I got it, despite a couple of bike accidents and other abuse of that magnitude.

It cost 25% more than the Asus I was considering but I would have replaced that long ago. Bargain.

BB

William

Quote:

Originally Posted by ztonzy

..and why is Apple shipping their computers with such low perfomance GFX boards when they say they put lots of quality in their hardware? that's a big question for me...and their computers aren't very cheap either, strange...

A new G5 comes with either a GeForce 6600 (256 mb), a GeForce 7800 GT (256 mb) or Quadro FX 4500 (512 mb). Low performance?

True that iMacs come with lower performance cards, but the ATI Radeon X600 XT (128 mb) that comes with the iMac G5 is not that bad.

sten

well...it is not the memorysize of the gfx card that makes it performe good...it is the chip

...and the GF 440 MX is a low performances chip...but of course the newer one you put up must be a lot better.

...and not to forget the fuel for the cards...the drivers...without them the cards sucks :P

lukep

some infos on the nvidia problem :

Others apps, like sketchup and others suffer the same problem. it seems to be indeed a problem in new drivers.

Meestaplu, yours dont seems to fall in same category.

i will keep you informed of progress

fawzi

Thanks for the info lukep.

I think that I also have this problem, basically all menus, popup & similar don't work (I can zoom, move, resize).
In fullscreen mode the things seem to work better.
I have ad dual G5 1.8 with GeForce FX 5200.
If you need more info I will gladly provide it.

ciao
Fawzi

PabloE

Hi, I've got the same hardware spec as fawzi and the same symptoms.

Sigh,

PabloE

Burritoboy

Still grim with a 12" PowerBook, Rev A.

Thanks for the efforts though.

BB

kattkieru

Just wanted to add my specs (and I'm glad I wasn't the only one):

Powerbook 1.33 GHz, 1.25 Gig of ram, GeForce Fx Go5200 (64 meg of ram)

The problem was so terrible that I actually dropped back to Panther. I've heard it's related to the things Apple is doing to make the old Carbon QuickDraw stuff obsolete?

Please keep us posted. I'd like to move back to Tiger when possible.