VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Fri Mar 15 2019 - 16:31:14 CDT

Hi,
  About 700 people downloaded the previous RTX build and a couple of
hard-core VMD users found a few things I needed to fix in the RTX-specific
parts of the VMD OptiX ray tracing engines. I've posted a new
64-bit Linux test build of VMD with RTX hardware accelerated
ray tracing support (1.9.4a31) on the web site. Please give it a spin
and let me know how it works for you.

The new version should work much better on complex scenes with
massive numbers of reflections or transparent geometry that the
previous test build didn't handle properly due to API changes
in the newest OptiX that hadn't been reflected in the VMD RTX-specific
code path.

Best regards,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Mon, Feb 25, 2019 at 08:40:16PM -0600, John Stone wrote:
> Hi,
> Now that the NVIDIA drivers with RTX support are generally
> available, I have made a current 64-bit Linux test build of VMD 1.9.4 (a29)
> that includes RTX hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and it is
> posted on the web site. To use this version you will need the latest
> NVIDIA 418.xx (where xx >= 30) driver version from the NVIDIA web site.
>
> VMD users should expect TachyonLOPtiX ray tracing performance gains
> that range as high as 8x faster when comparing the new RTX GPUs with
> the new VMD with prior versions of VMD running on so-called
> Pascal and Volta class NVIDIA GPUs.
>
> Best regards,
> 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/