Simple: Click the Apple Menu / System Preferences / Expose & Spaces / Expose Tab / Dashboard section / Hide & Show
It’s set to F12 by default, but you could disable it or set it to F8 (Press it now to see if F8 is already in use). Then F12 would be free for Render in Blender.
Wm
P. S. This applies to Tiger also, just no “Spaces” on the Expose Pref Pane.
Hey guys, so I was playin’ around on my macbook. I had heard that it’s the integrated graphics driver that’s the problem.
I have the developer tools installed right now, so I opened up the openGL monitor and recorded a graph of the activity which is what you see below.
The area to the left is the level of usage with my mouse just moving around areas of the screen that are os x. The area to the right is what happened as soon as I moused over the blender interface. Actually moving in the 3D view wasn’t as bad, but as soon as I did as much as mousing over buttons or panels OpenGL usage spiked to 100%. Could this just be a driver leak or something?
Same problem here. I have found that if you size down the window a bit it speeds things up.
I’m currently running official Blender 2.45 on both my MacBook (Intel Dual Core 2.0 GHz, 1GB RAM), and my 24" iMac (Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz, 3GB RAM) and have had no problems with speed, rendering, lock ups or anything. Working 100%.
Also, I love the new Leopard, such an amazing interface!
CoreyAvitar what is the Graphics Unit on your macbook, is it a Intel GMA 950?
I suspect that the problem is that some OpenGL operation is going through a slow path, e.g. using the CPU for doing some operations. I’m trying to locate the problem but I don’t know enough (yet) about blenders architecture to get a clear idea of the problem nor the solution.
Does anyone know if this problem has been logged? (http://projects.blender.org/tracker/?group_id=9) - I have been looking tonight, but have not found anything.
Yep, my system profiler says I’m running the GMA 950.
Dangit, is there a way to select video card in blender or something?
Wait Gobely, when did you get your macbook? is it Core 2 Duo?
K, I was just looking up some stuff. The driver for the GMA 950 in 10.4 used GLSL version 1.1, and leopard uses 1.2.
Have also a good running blender on leopard. speed is not bad and not good.
the only thing that not runs is sculpt mode. i have connected a logitech standart pc mouse without any driver installation.
running 10.5.1 2.6 Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB Ram, GeForce 8600M GT
and under parallels with windows the blender installation first requested a python and blender crashes on startup, after installing python, it was the same.
greez noltze
…So it seems that most problems are occuring in macbooks… my iMac with Leopard is shipping (:D) and there shouldn’t be any problems with that I guess, but I’ll keep you people posted either way. Haven’t seen many comments about iMacs and blender (I guess no news is good news)
The same goes for me. On my macbook (Core2 duo 1.83 GHz, 3GB Ram, Intel GMA950) blender was fine with os x 10.4 (tiger) and is barely usable with os x 10.5 (leopard).
On my wifes macbook (Core2duo, 2GHz, 2.5 GB Ram, Intel GMA X3100, OS X 10.5) the problem is the same.
Mouseclicks generally take up to 3 seconds until the gui responds. Pressing “s” for scale (new scene, scaling the cube) takes again up to 3 seconds. Viewport splitting: 3 seconds until it is recognized, the separator line is not visible.
Filed a bugreport in blender.org bugracker: http://projects.blender.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=7996&group_id=9&atid=125
Even bought (yes, bought!) parallels for mac. Hoped that using blender in windows xp would be a temporary solution. The responsiveness-problem was almost gone, but the overall usability was disappointing due to keyboard mapping trouble.
My simple solution was: Switching back to os x 10.4. Since blender is the main thing I do on my machine, I simply need a working environment.
Will check blender from time to time on my wifes macbook.
Yt,
Gunnar
YES! iMac came, and blender responds perfectly. It’s an iMac 20-inch, 2.4ghz dual core, 2 gb RAM.
I am now noticing problems on my Macbook (Intel Core Duo, GMA 950). Worked great on Tiger, but now slow on Leopard. Dang, and I thought I would luck out. Blender still runs like clockwork on my 24" iMac though.
CoreyAvitar - I got my macbook in Oct 2006, so I just have the Core Duo.
I downloaded and istalled Blender on a Quad-Core Mac Pro running OSX Leopard at the Apple store in a local mall, and it all ran fine. I didn’t notice any lag or anything negative. This was mid-December, 2007, so the Blender 2.45 release was in effect.
I didn’t check, but I imagine the Mac Pro was using the NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT graphics card, as that is the standard installation. I am planning to buy a new Mac Pro with the ATI Radeon X1900 XT card, so if anyone has any experience with that one, I would appreciate your feedback!
I tested blender on my Bro’s new macbook pro. and it was great. It was a short test albeit, but fine all the same. I think you’ll be fine. :yes:
This problem should fix rewrite GHOST_DisplayManagerCarbon to Cocoa and upcoming blender event rewrite. Problem is that here is nobody to do this. With this should be possible compile 64bit blender for mac and probably fix another mac - blender bugs (i think it could help with mac blender glsl branch too.)
Now find somebody who can do that 
It was disused long time ago (check http://osdir.com/ml/video.blender.devel/2003-04/msg00063.html)
Thank you so much!
Oh how I WISH I were a developer. Dang it.
With OpenGL Profiler you can choose launch settings for an app, including graphics driver.
Is this what you meant?
I was playing different drivers (there’s quite a list) but none seem to be very much better.
yeah I had the same result amesb