From: Leandro Martínez (leandromartinez98_at_gmail.com)
Date: Mon Oct 20 2008 - 07:22:08 CDT

A good way to search for help within users of more diverse
applications is to run this small program: glxgears

Then you can search in forums for people complaining about
the low frame rate of this program, it will reflect quite well
how VMD should work, and you will know also what to expect
from your card, for example:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=247397

For Ubuntu you can easily search for people trying to enable
compiz with that card. It should work fine (I had that card
before in a laptop with compiz, the 3D acceleration is not
that bad, really). The things that will make compiz work
will be essentially the same that will make VMD work fast.

Leandro.

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 9:05 AM, Benjamin Bouvier
<benjamin.bouvier_at_ibcp.fr> wrote:
> Hi Nathan,
>
> Mesa is a software implementation of OpenGL that runs on your CPU instead of
> your GPU, hence the slow performance.
> To use the (very limited) 3D acceleration features of the 945GM chipset
> (like you did under Windows), you could try installing the Intel proprietary
> drivers from here:
>
> http://downloadcenter.intel.com/detail_desc.aspx?agr=N&ProductID=2301&DwnldID=9722&strOss=39&OSFullName=Linux*&lang=eng
>
> AFAIK, GLSL (OpenGL 2.0) is not mandatory to run VMD with hardware
> acceleration.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Benjamin.
>
>
> On Sat, 18 Oct 2008 21:06:35 +0200, <nbabcock_at_qis.ucalgary.ca> wrote:
>
>> Hi Everyone,
>>
>> I had previously been using VMD under Windows, and it worked wonderfully.
>> I recently threw off the Microsoft shackles (hooray!), and I am now
>> running VMD on the exact same hardware under Ubuntu Linux 8.04 (Xfce
>> desktop).
>>
>> I find VMD performance is noticeably worse under Linux. When rotating or
>> translating a molecule the motion is choppy, whereas before it was
>> perfectly smooth.
>>
>> The hardware itself is an Intel Centrino Duo, with the graphics card:
>> Mesa DRI Intel(R) 945GM 20061017 x86/MMX/SSE2
>>
>> I don't believe this card supports GLSL (if anyone can confirm this for
>> me, please do), but as I said, it still worked marvelously under Windows.
>>
>> Any advice for bringing Linux performance up to speed with Windows on this
>> hardware would be greatly appreciated.
>>
>> Cheerio,
>> Nathan Babcock
>> Institute for Quantum Information Science
>> University of Calgary
>>
>>
>>
>
>