VMD-L Mailing List

From: Gianluca Interlandi (gianluca_at_u.washington.edu)
Date: Thu Oct 20 2011 - 19:48:32 CDT

Dear VMD users,

A while ago I bothered this list asking for recommendations for a
lightweight laptop to buy which would support a decent 3D acceleration in
order to use VMD in presentations. I wanted to briefly update here on my
experience.

After a lot of waiting and searching I decided to go for a Thinkpad X120e
which has a dualcore AMD E-350 CPU, a Radeon HD 6310 graphics card and a
11.6-inch matte screen. I installed openSUSE 11.4 and the AMD Catalyst
driver 11.9 for the graphics card. So far I have tested it with glxgears
and VMD. Before installing the proprietary driver, i.e., using the driver
provided in the openSUSE installation (probably the opensource driver), I
got a maximum of 260 frames per second (fps) (this is already almost twice
faster than the 150 fps that I get on my Thinkpad T23 with Savage S3 card
and 3D turned off). It was not possible to switch the glxgears window to
full resolution using the opensource driver.

However, after installing the catalyst driver I got up to 2248 fps with
the default sized window and up to 426 fps with full blown window. This is
in my view acceptable for such a small laptop. VMD runs flawlessly. I
loaded a 400 AA protein complex and I can rotate it with no stutter using
the surface or VDW representation.

As a tip, I used Sebastian Siebert's script to install the ATI catalyst
driver in openSUSE 11.4:

http://www.sebastian-siebert.de/2011/09/28/opensuse-proprietaeren-grafik-treiber-amd-catalyst-11-9-als-rpm-installieren/

It's in german, but it's pretty easy to follow. Just scroll down until you
get to "Empfohlene Vorgehensweise:" and copy paste the commands into a
shell as root.

If you have any questions, please e-mail me off-list.

Gianluca

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Gianluca Interlandi, PhD gianluca_at_u.washington.edu
                     +1 (206) 685 4435
                     http://artemide.bioeng.washington.edu/

Postdoc at the Department of Bioengineering
at the University of Washington, Seattle WA U.S.A.
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