From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Jul 17 2006 - 11:17:25 CDT

Hi Ben,
  The x1600 may simply be suffering because it's a new chipset and has
relatively young/immature drivers. I agree that one would expect the x1600 to
decimate the EG2, GMA900 etc. What color depth and display resolution are you
using on your machine? I've seen a number of ATI cards that would perform
nicely at medium resolution, but would start losing performance fast when
the display resolution was raised beyond a particular threshold, or when
the color depth was set to anything other than 32-bit truecolor. (for
some reason the ATI cards historically favored particular color depth modes)
You'll want to check the documentation of your card for their best performance
suggestions. Try running the card at 1280x1024 and see if your performance
changes at all. Also, be sure that you're running the latest driver of course.

  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Sat, Jul 15, 2006 at 11:39:25PM -0400, Benjamin Goldsteen wrote:
> Hello John,
>
> I've seen benchmarks showing the ATI X1600 XT running about 2/3rds of
> a GeForce 6800GS, but I've never thought of it as a slow GPU. In any
> case, it should be much faster than the integrated graphics in the
> Dell 700M? The Dell 700M's used Intel Extreme Graphics 2 (EG2) which
> is the predecessor to GMA900. The X1600 should be off the charts
> compared to the GMA900 not to mention the EG2.
>
> Best,
> Ben
>
>
> On Jul 13, 2006, at 11:42 AM, John Stone wrote:
>
> >
> >Hi,
> > The X1600 is the same chip in the Intel-based Mac I use as a compile
> >box, and while it's ok, it's not setting any speed records here
> >either.
> >Granted, I'm using it on a Mac and a new version of MacOS X, so
> >there's
> >bound to be room for driver improvement, but it's certainly not at all
> >comparable to a GeForce 6800 for example. One question for you is
> >what
> >resolution you're running at, and what representations you're using.
> >You also didn't say what host processor you've got, which while only
> >a small part of the performance story does indeed matter for some
> >representations, particularly when play trajectories.
> >
> > John Stone
> > vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
> >
> >On Thu, Jul 13, 2006 at 07:39:59AM -0500, Yu Zhou wrote:
> >>Hi there,
> >>
> >>I recently upgraded my video car to X1600 256M, the lastest product
> >>from ATI. However, the rendering speed of this video card is
> >>disappointingly low in VMD 1.8.4. The FPS was almost the same as that
> >>of a Dell 700M laptop for the same rendering task, while the latter
> >>was just using a shabby integrated graphic chip.
> >>
> >>I've installed the lastest drive for the X1600 and I'm running WINXP
> >>PRO SP2 on both two machines. The rendermode was the default OpenGL.
> >>
> >>Does anyone have anything to say about this?
> >>
> >>Thanks
> >>
> >>Yu Zhou
> >>
> >>WashU School of Medicine.
> >
> >--
> >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

-- 
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