On that same scene, with the same window size, I easily turn 140 FPS or so.

At the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference held a few weeks ago, Apple announced OS X 10.14 Mojave.

In amongst all of the other things Apple announced, one announcement has made waves in the gaming world: they announced that, as of Mojave, OpenGL was deprecated and would no longer be maintained.

Im not speaking for the Firestorm team, and certainly not for Linden Lab.

I think Apple seriously shot themselves in the ass with their recent announcement.

What they did announce was that Mojave would deprecate OpenGL.

What they did not announce was a drop-dead release beyond which OpenGL would not work.

Indeed, OpenGL works in Mojave, and with a couple of fixes not related to the graphics subsystem, the Linden viewer (and, presumably, Firestorm; we havent tested it ourselves) runs on Mojave just fine.

Those fixes will be in the next release of Firestorm, which we are moving toward.

To understand the magnitude of the problem, let me lay a couple of numbers on you.

Firestorm currently consists of 25,649 files of source code, containing well over 1.2 million lines.

I dont know just how much of that is OpenGL code.

What I do know is that there is no clean boundary in the viewers source code between the parts that use OpenGL and the parts that dont; OpenGL is scattered throughout the entire codebase.

This is true of every viewer based on the Linden Lab code, which is all of them that do graphics (with the notable exception of Lumiya, which was a ground-up implementation for Android, and a remarkable technical achievement in its own right).

Simply to factor all of that out so theres a clean separation between the graphics code and the rest of the viewer is a monumental task.

Once thats done, then a separate renderer would need to be written just for the Mac.

Thats not a trivial undertaking, and to the best of my knowledge, there are exactly five people on the planet who understand the Second Life render pipeline well enough to do it: two of them work for Linden Lab, and the other three are certifiably insane.

In any event, the effort required to do this is measured in man-years.

Its telling that Apple committed large amounts of time and money and people resources to Unity and Unreal to get their game engines ported to Metal.

My understanding of the Linden Lab position on this is that theyre evaluating what they are going to do going forward, and that no decisions have been made.

I would hope they are at least talking with Apple to see how much time they have.

I do not, and in any case were dependent on what the Lab does.

While I am a faithful Mac user and have been for the last 16 years, I have not actually used a Mac as my primary Second Life system in a few years.

Apples OpenGL implementation, not to put too fine a point on it, sucks.

I usually get 30-40 FPS on one scene I spend a lot of time in, on my dual-hex MacPro 3.3 GHz64 GB, with a Radeon R9-280X.

I have actually wound up running Linux Mint natively on a second Mac Pro, this one a dual-quad 2.9 GHz48 GB with a GTX 960.

Firestorm Viewer For Mac