Best Laptops For Second Life: Recent MacBook Air Model Runs SL Surprisingly Well (With Some Graphics Settings Tweaked)

Thanks to reader "dkronfeld" for sending this photo which effectively demonstrates a pretty surprising point he made in a recent open forum: With the right settings, Second Life runs pretty damn well on a recent model MacBook Air! Pictured above is his 2020 MacBook Air with an M1 processor, 16GB RAM, and the 8 core GPU. (This one here, with a starting price of $999.)

Emphasis on "right settings", though, as dkronfeld explains:

The MacBook Air runs SL surprisingly well, if you disable Hardware Open GL Vertex Buffer Objects (used to be a graphics setting, is now a debug setting) and set water reflections to "None:Opaque". It's actually a shockingly good SL laptop, if "not too heavy" is a requirement.

The debug setting is called RenderVBOEnabled. It's set to TRUE by default and (at least ARM-based) Mac users should set it (or try it set to) FALSE.

So that's impressive! Compare and contrast with Whiskey Day's recommended PC laptop, which looks great display-wise, but weighs in at 4.4 lbs versus the M1 Air's 2.8 lbs (More than a 1.5 lbs difference!) and costs about $800 more.

As always, caveat emptor et cacas (buyer beware n' shit) but now I'm personally interested in getting a MacBook Air as my next laptop.

Comments

[Jimmy]

The M1 is a great laptop, but I can't wait to get my hands on the M2 beast!

[Not an Apple Fan]

Just what residents need a laptop that's not upgradable for the owner and can only be repaired by apple.

Great a walled garden PC for a walled garden VW.

Almost any laptop nowadays can run SL very well, most as low as $399.

[Da5id Kronfeld (dkronfeld)]

@Jimmy: I'm going to t have the chance to try SL on an M2 Air in a couple of weeks, and I'm really curious about how it stacks up against the M1. My current marching is a 14" MacBook Pro with the M1 Max (32 core GPU) and for single SL sessions it's not much faster than the M1 Air. On the other hand it'll run 3 SL viewers at once without getting the least bit sluggish.

What I really want to see is LL do a native ARM build for the new Macs. I have a feeling that may not happen for a long time though.