VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue Jul 13 2004 - 21:00:36 CDT

Jerry,
  Yes, VMD uses those exentions, though to enable them with the
recent builds of VMD, you have to change the display render mode
from "Normal" to "GLSL", and you'd better hope your video driver
isn't buggy, because these particular extensions are very rough on
graphics boards. :-) :-) :-)

I have not yet found a video driver that can actually handle the full
version of my VMD programmable shader, most can only handle about 2 lights
at a time, rather than 4, and none have succesfully run the fog code yet.

That said, if you're feeling adventurous and your video driver actually
supports programmable shading, you can enable it in VMD 1.8.3a14 or later,
like this:
  display rendermode GLSL

If VMD finds that your video card is "lying" or can't actually handle
compiling the programmable shader, you'll get a message like this:
  Warning) OpenGL Programmable Shading not available.

I haven't got any NVidia machines setup for testing their latest
drivers with GLSL support yet, so you will be the first person to
actually test this on an NVidia card. I've run the programmable shader
on the 3DLabs Wildcat VP cards, and the ATI Radeon 9[678]00 cards, but
this is probably the first NVidia driver available that supports this
feature, so we'll have to see how buggy it is. Give it a try and
let me know what happens.

In the best-case scenario, you'll be able to make images like these
with the new display drivers, at the default VMD settings (compare
the "normal" version with the "shader" version for each image):
  http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/files/oglshader/jpeg/

In any case, this is an up-and-coming feature of VMD. I've worked
out many of the kinks to enable programmable shading, but I'm still
waiting for the OpenGL drivers from the major vendors to be a lot more
bug-free before I recommend people really start using it for anything.

Before it is finished, I also need to add the necessary shader code to
support 3-D texturing, which isn't implemented in the GLSL code yet.

Try it out and let me know what happens, I'll be curious to hear about
how the NVidia driver runs (or doesn't).

Thanks,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Tue, Jul 13, 2004 at 09:00:21PM -0400, Jerry Ebalunode wrote:
> Hi John,
> Does the 1.8.3 version of vmd use the extra opengl features made available
> through the new nvidia drivers? The new ones I am seeing on my geforce fx
> 5600 card when I run alpha14 of vmd1.8.3 include GLSL, SHO, SHV, SHF.
> Thanks for the reply in advance. 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349              
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078