I just upgraded my iMac G5 today and everything looks OK, but I have not done any real work in blender yet, just did a quick render from my current project to see if it works at all…
One question: anyone here who has Ubuntu running (on an iMac) via bootcamp and can tell me about possible (installation) issues (fan…?, 16:9 display…?) or maybe has a couple of related links. I want to see how blender performs under Ubuntu vs. Mac OS X, should be useful to have to Linux option…
Have you thought about/tried to run blender via Bootcamp and Ubuntu…? This is at least what I am about to do right now, not sure if my iMac G5 will run smoothly under Ubuntu, a couple of months ago I read that there might still be issues with the internal fan and the 16:9 display.
That aside, last spring I’ve been to a one week blender training and for the first time was only working under Linux. My impression was that this is a very good alternative to OS X when it comes to using blender, e.g. right now the OS X version of blender is not optimised for 64-bit yet - but the one for Ubuntu has been for a long time… So maybe this is an option worth checking out when upgrading to Leopard and having problems with blender under OS X.
I used to run YellowDog on my G4 Mac and I did not see any difference in performance But I did see a UI difference when stretching the screen to 1280x1024 (which had some issues in MacOS and not in Linux.) This I would assume was lack of GPU memory that MacOS used up and Linux did not.
I’ve got a one year old MacBook (2nd Generation), same issue, Blender is to slow to work with…Everything else runs fast as hell (Photoshop CS3, Quake III,…).
I don’t think that this is because of the gma950…while I’m working with Blender, the graphics card has’nt anything else to do and it handled it fine with Tiger…
So maybe there’s
a) an opengl issue with blender or
b) again a driver problem of the gma (maybe there’s a new driver in leopard)
On the apple website: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html#graphics
it says:
Updated OpenGL
Run even the most up-to-date OpenGL-based applications that make the most of the latest technologies.
and
Multicore Enhanced
Get optimum performance from Core Image, Core Animation, and OpenGL, all tuned to tap the power of your Mac’s multicore processor.
Perhaps these changes would effect blender. If not the updated OpenGl, then whatever the multicore thing is.
But why only MacBook?
I’m having some serious problems with blender under Leopard. It is very slow when splitting the viewport, displaying popups and menus. Sometimes it also looks like it anti-aliases the drawing in blender where it normally doesn’t. I’m using a MacMini i386 dual core 2GHz. Does anyone else have these problems or better yet a solution ?
Bootcamp won’t work on a G5 iMac but if you mean natively run maybe PPC Ubuntu that might work. I tried Ubuntu out through a VM and it was a bit slow and I just felt I wouldn’t be able to do the stuff I can with OS X. I can’t get all the commercial software I use. As for using it just for Blender, I’d probably use Windows instead. A clean install of Windows from a good installer disc performs pretty well and still has quicktime support.
I don’t think Bootcamp supports Linux - though it’s not really Bootcamp that does the booting as is widely believed. All Bootcamp does is dynamically partition the drive, it’s not involved in the actual running of any systems. There was a firmware upgrade that made this possible. It would have been possible before if Apple had gone with the legacy BIOS instead of the newer EFI. This is another reason why we still can’t get good GPUs as they support the old BIOS systems. Vista was supposed to support EFI but I think they pulled it out.
For Linux booting on an Intel Mac, people have suggested this software:
I haven’t upgraded to leopard yet and Blender runs fine under Tiger. I probably won’t upgrade until Blender is fixed.
The multi-core stuff related to OpenGL is probably about the new LLVM they added. In order to support features that are unsupported in hardware, they have implemented a low level virtual machine that runs stuff in software on one of the available CPU cores. This may explain the anti-aliasing seen by the previous poster. Can you turn off anti-aliasing in Blender using a command-line option or user preference?
Ahhh… I just did not know that and checked to make sure, but you are right… And Bootcamp actually was the only reason why I upgraded from 10.3.9… So probably no Ubuntu for me then - now that I finally managed to download the right version for my iMac…
I’ve been trying to compile blender 2.45 from scratch; however, compilation craps out when trying to build SDL.
http://www.nabble.com/SDL-not-building-on-OS-X-10.5-(Leopard)---tf4697168.html
Looks like SDL is a known problem.
I bought a macbook with santa rosa, and leopard was in it. i downloaded blender and a) was sad there was no OSX 64bit version to dowload.
b) blender is really hicky, it respondes to the clicking of the buttones panel buttons real slow, like… 3 ou 4 seconds afterwards. it is not working good for me. not snappy at all, liek i know and love blender…
Can anyone confirm this:
• delete the default cube
• try to undo…
Ups…?! Seems like undo is not working at all, at least for me. (2.45 PPC)
My experiences with blender on a macbook (with the new OS of course) (2.2ghz intel dual core, 1gb ram) are not that great. Seems unreliable. The UI/graphics seems to be slow (i.e., you click a button and there’s about half a second delay before it depresses. Same with selecting an object, etc.) In some cases the rendering is faster. In other cases it’s incredibly slow. For example, it renders very nicely when spot lamps are used. With an area lamp (even on 1 sample) it slows down to HOURS to render a simple object.
Luckily this is a friend’s laptop.
I have the same experience with a MacBook, Core Duo, 2,16 ghz, 2gig ram with the GMA950-graphiccard - changing perspective (tilt, rotate, zoom) works fine. But clicking buttons, adding objects, opening menus is taking 3-4 seconds. Also, while trying to split the screen, the line to do so is flickering a lot.
So folks, don’t upgrade to leopard yet. My system also got a lot more unstable than with tiger, hat two complete crashes in the last seven days since I installed it, safari crashes at least twice a day (roughly 12 hours on per day)… nice new features, though. 
I’ve got the same setup (MacMini) and the exact same problem – extremely slow menus, weird blurring on the parts of the UI at times. And no solution. ~sigh~ It’d be really, really, really nice to figure out what’s going on with it, though. I want to be able to use Blender again…
Looks like I am suffering from the Wifi issue as well now 
except a few things, everything runs fine here.
MacBookPro 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB Ram,Blender 2.45.
I’ve checked the 2.43 game demos, so far it all was fine, means it has the same old bugs, except one:
old errors (also in 10.4):
still the console reports Python-C api mismatches of the Versions (Pyton is 1013 blender 1012)
Thats it so far from here.
Only a few crashes occured when i tried to open files via the File Menue, only on a certain directory.
Performance is a bit better than in 10.4 (faster startups, faster start of ge).
No other Problems occured so far …
X11 is fine, as well gimp runs okay (I am using a darwinport build, compiled locally).
I reinstalled Blender on my macbook today, but it still doesn’t run the way i want…
Checked blender on a iMac with Leopard today and it seemed to work. Maybe the problem on the Mac Mini is the intel graphics device in combination with Leopard. I have tried blender on windows on boot camp with the same machine and here it works okay (it does have some stranged stray green dots in the line seperating the views when navigating around in space).
Just thought I’d point out that I’ve had Leopard for three days now, and Blender has been working perfectly. Very pleased with the OS as well 
.
Cuby
IT’S NOT ONLY BLENDER!!
I just installed Google Sketchup and guess what… The same problem!
from http://groups.google.com/group/SketchUp3d/browse_thread/thread/08801ac038bfb417/78363ac462d354aa:
Hi, i’ve just installed Leopard on my MacBook and I’m now experiencing
some small issues with Sketchup.
Firstly it’s just not running as smooth as it was in Tiger. The
graphics are a big jerky and every so often on an ‘orbit’ the program
will slow right down and it will take about a minute to do that orbit
with stuttery graphics. When this happens the program can’t be
touched…
google says they’re working on a leopard version
so the problem must not be simply a blender bug, or if it is, sketchup has the same bug…