VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue Dec 28 2004 - 10:56:26 CST

Hi,
  Generally speaking, remote rendering will be significantly slower
than local rendering, so you only want to do this when you have no
other choice. This is particularly true for apps that draw a lot of
geometry using immediate mode OpenGL. We've made a large number of
changes in VMD 1.8.3 to make it more remote-display friendly (and faster
in general..) but even so, you'll still notice a big difference between
local and remote display performance.

You might also experiment with enabling "Display->Cachemode->On" in
the GUI of VMD 1.8.3b1, this enables a feature which can give a huge
performance boost on remote displays, tiled displays, etc.
For the display of a static molecular structure, the display cachemode feature
should give you anywhere from a 10x to 50x performance boost over normal
rendering. Some machines also get a performance benefit for local rendering
when the caching code is enabled, but that's less frequently the case than
for remote display. Try that out and let us know how it works for you.

  John

On Tue, Dec 28, 2004 at 03:39:32PM +0100, Greipel.Joachim_at_MH-Hannover.DE wrote:
> Hi All,
> I am setting up VMD on a DUAL-Opteron machine for rendering on remote
> X-Servers which run under Linux and are equipped with NVIDA Quadro
> Graphics and Hardware Stereo.
>
> The rendering on the remote machines worked (even stereo display with
> crystal eyes) but unfortunately it was very (!) slow. I just installed
> the 1.8.3b1 version and to my surprise the rendering on the remote
> machines is now acceptably fast.
>
> There are slight differences in the startup messages of VMD
>
> 1.8.3b1 ("fast rendering")
>
> Info) Email questions and bug reports to vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
> Info) Please include this reference in published work using VMD:
> Info) Humphrey, W., Dalke, A. and Schulten, K., `VMD - Visual
> Info) Molecular Dynamics', J. Molec. Graphics 1996, 14.1, 33-38.
> Info) -------------------------------------------------------------
> Info) Multithreading available, 2 CPUs detected.
> Info) OpenGL renderer: Quadro4 980 XGL/AGP/SSE2
> Info) Features: STENCIL STEREO RN MDE MTX PP
> Info) OpenGL Programmable shading is NOT available.
> Info) Textures: 2-D (4096x4096), 3-D (512x512x512), Multitexture (4)
>
> 1.8.2 ("slow rendering")
>
> Info) http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/
> Info) Email questions and bug reports to vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
> Info) Please include this reference in published work using VMD:
> Info) Humphrey, W., Dalke, A. and Schulten, K., `VMD - Visual
> Info) Molecular Dynamics', J. Molec. Graphics 1996, 14.1, 33-38.
> Info) -------------------------------------------------------------
> Info) Multithreading available, 2 CPUs detected.
> Info) OpenGL renderer: Quadro4 980 XGL/AGP/SSE2
> Info) Features: STENCIL STEREO RN MTX
> Info) Textures: 2-D (4096x4096), 3-D (512x512x512), Multitexture (4)
> vmd >
>
> Is there any rational explanation for this behaviour?
> Thanks a lot,
>
> Joachim Greipel
>
> Medizinische Hochschule Hannover
> Germany 

-- 
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