From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Aug 27 2018 - 11:35:47 CDT

Hi,
  Yes, this is going to be the first version of VMD that supports the
hardware-accelerated ray tracing engines found in the new NVIDIA "RTX" GPUs.

The performance of the RTX hardware can give a tremendous speed boost for the
interactive OptiX ray tracing engine in VMD. For the most difficult ray tracing
cases, I have found that the performance of the new "Turing" RTX GPUs can be as much
as 8x faster than the previous generation Volta-based GPUs for the pure ray tracing
phase of rendering. This has a huge impact on the use of rendering features like
Depth of Field that require a large number of rays to achieve high quality output.
If time allows before I release the new VMD, I may actually add a few new rendering
features just because the performance is so much higher now, it makes a bunch of
difficult rendering features much much more practical for scientists to use.

My goal for VMD is to achieve ray tracing performance levels that are
high enough to permit ray tracing to be used as an equal alternative to rasterization
in the main VMD window even for trajectory playback, but there are performance hurdles
that I have to address in VMD itself and I also need some perf issues addressed in
the back-end OptiX infrastructure to achieve that goal.

Up to this point I've been doing my VMD development using both a pre-production GPU,
and bleeding edge experimental drivers and libraries, so there is an expectation
that the back-end OptiX performance will continue to increase, and that overheads will
decrease. I'm working hard to get to the goal of full trajectory playback with RTRT.
To get there I need to get all of the RT rendering setup steps down into the
"milliseconds" range, even for complex scenes. It's tricky, but I'm confident I'll get there.

Best regards,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
  

On Mon, Aug 27, 2018 at 04:07:57PM +0000, Daniel Moore wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Does this confirm a real time ray-tracing mode for VMD v1.9.4?
>
> Best,
> Daniel
>
> > On 27 Aug 2018, at 16:53, John Stone <johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> > The next test version of VMD has a bunch of new capabilities in it that require
> > video drivers that are as-yet not available to the general public. I have test drivers
> > but they are restricted by NDA. When the new video drivers are released to the public,
> > I will be posting new test builds of VMD. The current expectation I have is that
> > the new drivers will become available in mid-September, and then I will be able to
> > post the latest test builds of VMD for people to try. Although VMD will run (in a
> > less featureful state) without the upcoming video drivers, VMD itself is also compiled
> > against various shared libraries, and I'm expecting production versions of some key
> > shared libraries to become available contemporaneously with the video drivers, so this
> > is why I don't just release test builds right this moment.
> >
> > Best regards,
> > John Stone
> > vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
> >
> >> On Sun, Aug 26, 2018 at 03:12:23PM +0000, ABEL Stephane wrote:
> >> Giacomo,
> >>
> >> I have seen the alpha version in the VMD download page. But since this version was compiled 8 months ago, I thought that a newer version of VMD 1.9.4 (beta?) could exist and be downloaded
> >>
> >> Thanks
> >>
> >> Stéphane
> >>
> >>
> >> ________________________________________
> >> De : Giacomo Fiorin [giacomo.fiorin_at_gmail.com]
> >> Envoyé : dimanche 26 août 2018 16:32
> >> À : ABEL Stephane
> >> Cc : vmd-l_at_ks.uiuc.edu
> >> Objet : Re: vmd-l: 1.9.4 beta version of VMD
> >>
> >> If you do a web search with "vmd download", the first result will be the download page :-)
> >>
> >> Pre-compiled alpha versions are not for all platforms. Windows is not available, and it is up to you to find out which "UNIX" version you need. UNIX includes very different operating systems with similar, but not identical specs.
> >>
> >> On Sun, Aug 26, 2018 at 9:15 AM ABEL Stephane <Stephane.ABEL_at_cea.fr<mailto:Stephane.ABEL_at_cea.fr>> wrote:
> >> Dear all,
> >>
> >> I would like to test the latest 1.9.4 beta version of VMD for windows and UNIX. It is possible to downlaod them ? If yes, where ?
> >>
> >> Thanks
> >>
> >> Stéphane
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> Giacomo Fiorin
> >> Associate Professor of Research, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA
> >> Contractor, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD
> >> http://goo.gl/Q3TBQU
> >> https://github.com/giacomofiorin
> >
> > --
> > 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/