3D Pipes screen saver for macOS

The classic Windows 95 / NT / XP "3D Pipes" screen saver, rebuilt natively for modern macOS. Pixel-for-pixel faithful to the original's look and behaviour, and cheap enough to leave on all day: about 1.7% of one CPU core at full resolution, no GPU shading, no web view, no helper processes.

• Works on macOS 14 Sonoma, 15 Sequoia and macOS 26, Apple Silicon and Intel (universal binary)
• Nostalgia-accurate: the same growth rules, four-colour palette, elbow and ball joints, the random camera views, the square dissolve wipe, and yes, the 1-in-200 Utah teapot
• Efficient by design: a tiny software renderer draws only the new pipe segments each frame into a persistent framebuffer, and hands the compositor zero-copy IOSurfaces
• Verified: a comparison harness renders the same random seed in the reference implementation and here, and diffs the images (99.8% of pixels identical, the rest within two 8-bit steps)
• Robust on modern macOS: works around the macOS 14+ screen saver host never stopping or releasing third-party savers, so it does not keep rendering after you come back

Install

1. Download Pipes.saver.zip from the latest release and unzip it.
2. Double-click Pipes.saver (or copy it to ~/Library/Screen Savers/).
3. Open System Settings › Screen Saver and pick 3D Pipes.

The bundle is ad-hoc signed, not notarised, so on first use macOS may say it cannot verify the developer. Either right-click the bundle and choose Open, or clear the quarantine flag:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine ~/Library/Screen\ Savers/Pipes.saver

If you are replacing an older version, macOS keeps the previous code loaded until its screen saver host restarts:

killall legacyScreenSaver

Build from source

Requires the Xcode Command Line Tools. No Xcode project, no dependencies:

./build.sh --install

That compiles a universal Pipes.saver into build/ and installs it to ~/Library/Screen Savers/. ./verify.sh loads the bundle exactly the way macOS does, shows it in a window for a few seconds, and prints the frame count and CPU usage.

Every knob is in the Tuning enum at the top of PipesSaverView.swift: tick rate, pipe colours, seconds between wipes, teapot odds, and the framebuffer scale (set targetFramebufferWidth to 480 for a chunky, integer-scaled pixel-art look).

How it stays faithful

This is not an approximation of 3D Pipes; it is a port of the reference implementation, Isaiah Odhner's pipes, which was itself cross-checked against the Windows NT 4.0 SDK source of the original OpenGL screen saver.

• Same random generator (mulberry32), consumed in the same order, so a seed produces the same pipe network, colours, joints and camera in both implementations
• Same meshes: three.js's 10-sided open cylinder, 8×8 sphere, and the 32-patch Utah teapot, with the same vertex normals rounded to 32-bit float
• Same camera: a 45° perspective camera, head-on or rotated 90° about a random axis, run through the same lookAt and orbit-controls maths, quirks included
• Same lighting: Blinn-Phong with the exact terms of the three.js r98 shader, evaluated per pixel on interpolated normals, under the same ambient and directional lights
• Same rasterisation model: triangles sampled at pixel centres, LEQUAL depth, perspective-correct interpolation, no antialiasing

compare/ contains the scripts that render one seed both ways and diff the results. Across five seeds at 1470×956 the images agree on 99.75 to 99.92% of pixels exactly, with 9 to 129 mismatched pixels out of 1.4 million, all on silhouette edges.

How it stays cheap

Most "retro screen saver" ports for the Mac wrap a web page or a full 3D engine and burn a core or two plus the GPU. This one does not redraw anything: each new segment is rasterised once into a persistent colour and depth buffer (a few hundred microseconds), and frames reach the compositor through two IOSurfaces with dirty-rectangle copies, so the GPU only ever scales one texture. The result is 1.7% of one core at 30 Hz on a 1470×956 display, dropping further when the pipes get stuck and nothing changes.

Credits

• Original 3D Pipes by Microsoft (Windows NT 4.0 OpenGL screen saver samples)
• Behavioural port from pipes by Isaiah Odhner, MIT
• Utah teapot tessellation from three.js's TeapotBufferGeometry by Eric Haines, MIT; teapot data by Martin Newell

MIT licensed. See LICENSE.

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