OSX Mavericks and Blender Thread

[davida]

Just installed OSX Mavericks and so far on a 2010 MacBook Pro we’re all good. Going to try the MacPro tomorrow and see what nonsense I get

[LordOdin]

boooooooooo!

[Superflea]

@LordOdin

boooooooooo!

Oh Shush.

@davida: thanks for reporting, I was going to wait a while especially for Blender in case of some day one weirdness. Keep us updated if you find anything!

[justavisitor]

Hi davida - did you do any of the benchmarks on your old system so you can compare performances?

I compared Snow Leopard and Lion, and Lion turned out to be almost 10% slower, though I added 16 extra gigs of ram before upgrading to Lion.

Could be interesting to see if Mavericks is better or worse…

[davida]

I’ll run a Mike Pan test tonight to see - that would be a good idea (I’ve done some in the past)

One thing I’m noticing right now is: if an audio file is in the NLE, clicking anywhere on the timeline plays it. Is that accurate? Never noticed it before.

I’ll do some rigorous tests tomorrow - I was out most of this weekend

[cekuhnen]

To me on my iMac MacPro and MacBookPro Blender works fine. No problem. OS X 10.9 for me is the best thing ever because besides tags and taps in the finder it also offer full menus on multiple screens on one system - this makes dual display work very convenient.
3D modeling one screen - 2D sketching the other screen - rendering on the next machine

[davida]

I do have a bug that I will submit tonight. It seems no matter where you click on the timeline, you get audio playing if there’s an audio file in the Blend File. Before it would scrub the timeline. Can you test it out for me cekuhnen?

It’s the only thing that I’ve found so far that’s a problem.

[Marc_Clint_Dion]

Awesome thread! I’m a little biased of course since I was just going through the list to see if this is the proper place to post such a thread. You beat me to it.

Anyways, I also thought that this would be a good idea since there was a bug report posted that has a video showing some fellow who installed Mavericks and is now having a terrible time with his 3D Viewport. Apparently it keeps stuttering, then it stops, then it starts again. I was hoping to find out about other issues that people might be having before I upgrade. So I apologize for not having any first hand information but I will post any findings from the research that I will be doing on the subject matter at hand.

Here is the required search info for the bug tracker. I’m posting this instead of a link since I’m not sure if the bug tracker uses static page addresses.

[#37201] OSX Mavericks OpenGL Blender Viewport performance issues

[cekuhnen]

mh - so I thought maybe it was something old I had installed. Blender made the MacBookpro crash - reset.

With Mavericks Blender quite quickly or OS X with Blender quite quickly crashes the moment I start doing something in the viewport.
I can move pan a little and then the laptop resets …

Somebody else experienced this?

[Ace_Dragon]

Just to note (even though I use Windows), I have foundreading through on the Modo forumsthat Mavericks is causing that application to crash a lot as well along with giving it OpenGL issues, so it is not an issue exclusive to Blender.

From what I gathered, Mavericks might actually have genuine OpenGL bugs that are preventing some applications from working correctly, if this is at all related to Apple’s products declining in quality since the death of Steve Jobs (noting how iOS 7 became the buggiest release of their mobile OS), I’m left to wonder if Apple will again fade to near-obscurity like what happened to them in the 90’s (be prepared to move on to Windows or Linux if that becomes the case as otherwise it could severely impact productivity).

[sourvinos]

I updated to Mavericks since it come out, and I haven’t any problem in blender (nor in other applications), indeed I have faster response in the viewport. (I have an AMD card).

paolo

[Ace_Dragon]

Done some more reading around and it looks like some are finding the Mavericks update breaking Sculptris and the Unity Game Engine as well.

If it works and runs faster, more power to you, but it seems like there may have been some major oversights in terms of using various 3D applications.

[michalis]

(be prepared to move on to Windows or Linux

Your suggestion Ace?
Windows 8?
Or Ubuntu with latest features?

To all mac users (on topic now)
Who told you to upgrade the first release of OSX 10.9?
I hope you have a backup. No? Good for you. HDs aren’t expensive.
I’ll try Mavericks after a 10.9.1 or 10.9.2 release.
BTW there are a few reports on the zbrushCentral forum, some bad performance in the viewport.
You all aware that zbrush doesn’t use OGL or any GPU accelerator.
Similar issues though.
So, Ace, you don’t know if it is an OGL issue.

[cekuhnen]

Ace,

previous versions of Apple did not work well because to be quite honest the managers were not qualified. A CEO from pepsi running a high tech company?

I am on Android and let me tell you that my pure Google Nexus 4 experience is just a let down from the phone to the camera app, that system has some real problems as well.

Technology seems to get too complicated now.

[sourvinos]

Michalis,
yes, I may agree with your politic of waiting for updates, it was never wrong, though I must say that the most of issues in the past version updates were always due to not make a fresh install, and configurations or preferences conflicts.
I have my previous state ready to be restored from Time Machine and other back/ups but by now I’m quite sure I’ll not need it.

Ace Dragon,
I think you’re pushing it a bit too far with your assumptions.

paolo

[Marc_Clint_Dion]

Edit, this post went off topic and is better off somewhere else so as not to interfere with this specific thread.

[Marc_Clint_Dion]

@cekuhnen This post was more philosophy regarding poor workmanship. It cannot help us gain insight into how this issue with Mavericks can be resolved. I’ve removed it.

[cekuhnen]

Macr,

my statement was that there were few managers in Apple that actually where not qualified to do their job right. Jobs comes to the place back and in few years reforms that company.

Houses are different than operating systems in a sense of competition. American houses are not really that time consuming and hard to build. Coding a system is a different story.

But I agree with you that besides the pressure Apples faces right now they should get their act together in a better way.

[Kramon]

@marc dion

It’s not OpenGL or Apple, it’s Blender. Earlier today I installed Blender on an older Intel laptop and every time I attempted to open the user preferences dialogue, Blender would crash. I tried 64 bit and 32bit versions I tried a much older version from last year and every time it was the same thing. I started looking for a solution online and found a webpage that was 3 years old, he had a solution posted that helped get around the problem. Then I decided to see if this had been reported on the tracker and found out that Ton was blaming intel openGL drivers right from the beginning. I searched Google a bit more but now I used the keywords “blender tracker user preferences crash” take a look at how many reports have been made and for how years this has been going on. This issue is being reported over and over again by people for more than 3 years now and it’s being ignored. Blender is continuously being expanded instead of problems being fixed and dealt with. Today on the blendercoders forum, Ton was trying to motivate developers to get moving on expanding Blender. If the foundation of a house has serious infrastructure issues, you do not continue building until this problem is resolved, you certainly would not try and build this house into a 10 story building, if you do then the problems at the bottom cannot be fixed anymore. The whole thing will topple like a house of cards. Blender to me is looking like that Jenga game, soon the bugs are going to pile up and pile up and when one is fixed 5 more things will break. I didn’t make up that number on my own, one of the official developers recently joked that this was how things were started to look.

Here is what Ton said today about Blender 2.69, “so! 2.69 all ok! amazing”. That bug report about the viewport locking up under Mavericks means absolutely nothing to him. Neither do the three years of constant bug reports that have been coming in about Blender crashing when the user preferences panel is accessed, it’s not just Intel, some of those reports are coming from AMD users as well.

When I first started using Blender, I got used to the fact that new releases had new features but also plenty of older features that were now broken. I always have three or four versions installed so I can deal with this. It’s only going to get worse if the code is not fixed before any more expansion takes place. That man is going to destroy what he loves and helped build all these years, and all for the sake of some blind ambition that he seems to have developed.

No software should ever be published if it has not been extensively tested on many, many different OS’s and GPU brands. This is not hard to do. People throw away old computers every day. Homeless people walk around selling garbage computers. These old machines are free or at most $20.00 dollars and perfect for bug testing since they reveal every flaw in the software that you test on them because they are worn out and have limited resources. There is no excuse for this half-baked software authoring.

Try building a simple multi-res test model at the highest level that your machine can comfortably handle. Now activate the “textured solid” button. For me, with a project that is only currently using two GB’s, 4 GB’s of free RAM will suddenly disappear and when I watch the Activity monitor I can see the HD swap space usage will climb and climb and climb until so much space is being taken up that I have to force Blender to shutdown at one of the few moments when I am able to regain temporary control for fear that this may actually do damage to my system. I forced Blender to quit after 6BG’s of HD space was sucked up. I performed this test over and over. It happens every time. That is 10GB’s taken up for a sphere with multi-res and memory consumption will still climb further if allowed to continue running.

I reported this as a bug and two developers shrugged it off and said that they already know this and that it’s not a bug. That is how they are dealing with problems. If they don’t know what is wrong and they don’t want to deal with it then it’s not considered a bug. Blender will never be anything more than a hobby tool so long as this nonsense continues.

However, it is free and is stable enough for now to make good use of so long as the scene complexity is minimal and your computer costs at least $2000.00… for now.

I do love Blender for many reasons but it is becoming more and more flawed at the same time that it gets better. At least I spent 7-8 years learning Lightwave and have experience with both Max and Maya. When I put Blender on a resume it will go dead last so I won’t be laughed out the door.

Ton has to rethink everything that he is currently planning for Blender, it’s a slippery slope when defective software is expanded upon.

If you love Blender and want to see it thrive then do what must be done. Harrass and harang the developers to rebuilt from scratch and to postpone any future releases until everything is fixed, starting first with those horrendous memory leaks and regular crashes.

Thomas Dinges was recently asked about OpenCL support for AMD users. He mumbled something about the kernel then said, “Also we’ve already spent a lot of time building it and we don’t want to start over.” That’s become the new Blender philosophy. Good grief.

Now it’s time for me to be abused by all of the people who have attached their self-worth to being Blender users. Vive la difference!

I would say that blender really cares about Mac users. Autodesk even don’t look on Mac they didn’t make 3dsmax on Mac really long time few years ago they, thinked hymnn acctualy maybe we will do 3dsmax on mac. And still there is no retina support where blender has it.

[fahr (Chad Gleason)]

Jeez guys… It’s a first release of a new OS. It’s gonna have some bugs. What I’m taking from this thread is that blender doesn’t run perfectly yet on a new os release it’s never been tested on, which means blender is horrible buggy software that needs to be completely rethought, and apple is now quickly on its way to 90s-level irrelevancy.
God bless the internet.