VMD-L Mailing List

From: Bogdan Costescu (bcostescu_at_gmail.com)
Date: Mon Apr 15 2013 - 05:51:10 CDT

Hi John!

I have tested version 1.9.2 alpha 23 and everything works as it should with
the 3xx series driver from NVidia. By default, with my setup, VMD chooses
4 samples-per-pixel, which is the same value it chose with the 2xx series.
I could change that with the VMDMAXAASAMPLES environmental variable to 2, 8
or 16 and see how the start-up message and display speed changes. All is
well now :)

Thanks a lot for finding and implementing this solution!
Bogdan

On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 4:43 PM, John Stone <johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu> wrote:

> Bogdan,
> Sorry for the slow reply, I'm out of town at a conference and I haven't
> been email accessible for a few days. There was a bug in my code (somehow
> a half-finished change got into CVS rather than the right one) which
> I will fix when I return home. The next build should work correctly.
>
> Cheers,
> John Stone
> vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
>
> On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 01:19:09PM +0100, Bogdan Costescu wrote:
> > Hi John!
> >
> > The 1.9.2a20 version seems to have cured the performance issue, but
> > not with the default setting. I have to set VMDMAXAASAMPLES to 4 to
> > get about to about the same speed as the 2xx drivers.
> >
> > The VMD startup text doesn't change, still reporting:
> >
> > Info) [0] GeForce 9400 GT 4 SM_1.1 @ 1.38 GHz, 511MB RAM, KTO, OIO,
> ZCP
> > Info) OpenGL renderer: GeForce 9400 GT/PCIe/SSE2
> > Info) Features: STENCIL MSAA(16) MDE CVA MTX NPOT PP PS GLSL(OVFG)
> > Info) Full GLSL rendering mode is available.
> > Info) Textures: 2-D (8192x8192), 3-D (2048x2048x2048), Multitexture (4)
> >
> > i.e. the MSAA(16) is still present. When I set VMDMAXAASAMPLES, I see
> > printed 5 times:
> >
> > Info) User-requested OpenGL AA sample depth: 4
> >
> > but all that follows is again the same (including MSAA(16)). I don't
> > know if this is only cosmetic...
> >
> > But... the above results hold for driver 310.32; if using 313.09, I
> > get the slow speed independent of the VMDMAXAASAMPLES setting - but
> > this being a beta version might not mean much.
> >
> > Let me know if you'd like me to test some more.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Bogdan
> >
> > On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 3:25 PM, John Stone <johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu> wrote:
> > > Bogdan,
> > > I posted a new test build of VMD, give it a try and let me know
> > > if it cures the performance issue you'd observed previously.
> > >
> > > Cheers,
> > > John Stone
> > > vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
>
> --
> NIH Center 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/
>