VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue Mar 13 2018 - 09:36:16 CDT

Hi,
  The major detraction of the particular GPU model you list is
that it uses DDR3 RAM rather than GDDR5 RAM. The peak memory
bandwidth of the card with DDR3 is 16GB/sec. With GDDR5 the same
GPU gets 40GB/sec bandwidth. If you're running CUDA-enabled versions
of VMD on this machine, then things like the "QuickSurf" representation
and GPU ray tracing will run almost 3x faster on the GDDR5 version of
that GPU than on the DDR3 version. I understand that there's an
economic trade-off here, so you'll have to use your best judgement about
what will give you the best the value (for what you plan to use it for)
for your money.

Best regards,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Tue, Mar 13, 2018 at 05:35:32PM +0530, Debostuti Ghoshdastidar wrote:
> Dear All
>
> I have always used an NVidia GeForce card on my Lab system for running
> VMD. However, if I purchase a laptop with an Nvidia N16S-GTR DDR3L 2G card
> (in place of the GDDR5-Vram that is included in the GeForce series) would
> it be VMD compatible?
>
> Thanks in advance for any advise on this
>
> --
> Debostuti Ghosh Dastidar
> DST SERB National Post-Doctoral Fellow
> Molecular Biophysics Unit
> Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 

-- 
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/