

With about 600k active users on SL the suggestion is about 60k people run SL on an Apple. We also know that some of the top managers at the Lab run SL on Apple.
Best viewer for a mac on second life Pc#
In general Apple has a 3-4% share of the PC market. We guess the same numbers are true on the Linden viewer. (8/2017)įrom the Firestorm Dev Team, we know about 10% of their users run Apple. We’ve seen similar challenges on the Sansar side. Or at least none that is being communicated to the SL user base. While a change would have lots of advantages, there is no clear cost to benefit ratio to make a change while OpenGL is viable. The Lindens are likely watching the developments in the graphics field and are aware of the coming challenges to OpenGL. I wasn’t willing to dig past that blizzard. News wise any word on what Khronos is doing with OpenGL is buried by the news Apple is dropping it. One is popular and widely supported and the other is new, gaining acceptance, and free of legacy constraints. I consider OpenGL and Vulkan to be like Second Life and Sansar. Khronos says they are and will continue to develop OpenGL. One has to wonder which way they will go with any rendering updates and future support for Apple users. So…įor Linden Lab supporting older systems and Apple is a criterion. It isn’t a slow emulator attempting to do everything.ĭetails on the state of Vulkan: Vulkanised 2018 – Welcome and Intro. Khronos only translates the fast commands that directly translate. But, it is a Vulkan subset, meaning limited. However, there is a work-around that allows a Vulkan to Metal translator to ship with a game and thus run on Apple. Sort of like DirectX on the Microsoft side. The challenge is Apple, which does not support Vulkan and will not allow the installing of third-party drivers… It is Apple’s open source Metal or else… The big problem with that is Metal is NOT cross platform, meaning developers have to develop a special version for Apple and another for everything else.
Best viewer for a mac on second life android#
And interestingly Android supports Vulkan. Video cards made in the last 24± months will support Vulkan. Vulkan is generally well accepted, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Linux, etc. It took two-years to get from 1.0 to 1.1. But, I don’t know that it will be helpful for SL. The group is on the forefront of some interesting tech. (See: State of Graphics: DirectX 12 & Vulkan – 4/2016) Development is exciting and popular. Khronos, OpenGL’s developer, has introduced Vulkan. On the PC side of things OpenGL is still supported.
