VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed Feb 01 2012 - 14:12:47 CST

Hi,
  It really depends on which renderer you intend to use. Most of the
external renderers don't (yet) support GPU-acceleration. VMD can export
scenes to the NVIDIA Gelato renderer, which is a RenderMan-like renderer
that uses the GPU to accelerate the rendering process. VMD can also export
scenes to the Wavefront .OBJ scene format supported by Maya, 3DS Max, and
some of the NVIDIA OptiX tools, all of which have options for GPU-accelerated
rendering. You should also be able try out one of the experimental GPU-enabled
versions of the open source Aqsis RenderMan-compliant renderer. I have tested
VMD scene exports with the CPU versions of Aqsis, and they worked fine for
me previously, so I would expect that their new GPU test versions
ought to work as well, though I haven't tried them personally.

I intend to add GPU acceleration to Tachyon, but not until I get some
more GPU work done in VMD first.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Wed, Feb 01, 2012 at 09:04:02PM +0100, Albert wrote:
> Hello:
> I found that each time time I render the figure ,VMD will use the most
> CPU resource. I am wondering is it possible to use GPU for rendering?
>
> thank you very much 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/           Phone: 217-244-3349
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/       Fax: 217-244-6078