VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Apr 15 2013 - 09:51:45 CDT

Bogdan,
  I'm happy we got this solved. To be honest, I was a little surprised
that the new NVIDIA drivers changed the antialiasing behavior so radically,
but I'm glad I've got the new code in place and it's working for you.
Hopefully this particular kind of problem won't crop up again.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 12:51:10PM +0200, Bogdan Costescu wrote:
> 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/ 

-- 
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/