VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Thu Feb 01 2007 - 17:10:47 CST

Christoph,
  I've installed and run VMD on a Vista test box here, but I can't
make any quantitative comparisons as I don't have two identical
machines to test with, nor time to do detailed tests presently.
The performance ratios reported by the Tom's Hardware tests on games
like Quake are likely to be fairly representative for VMD running
in the normal non-GLSL rendering mode, using representations like
MSMS/NewRibbons/NewCartoon as VMD uses many of the same OpenGL calls
that quake does for those types of representations. It's not clear
to me how much performance loss will occur for things like CPK/Licorice/VDW
which make heavy use of OpenGL display lists, and immediate mode
transformations on a per-atom basis, which presumably will incur
more overhead in the new Vista software layers than large blocks of
vertex array data will. My guess is that the numbers shown for games
like Quake3 are probably somewhat indicative of what VMD would see.
If I can come up with a convenient way to test XP versus Vista on
the same hardware, I can run some VMD benchmarks and see how it
fares. My only advice to those wanting to run Vista is that they should
expect to spend additional money upgrading their video hardware as the OS
itself consumes a lot more video resources than XP did, which will compete
for graphics memory and resources with VMD and other graphical programs...

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Thu, Feb 01, 2007 at 02:23:58PM -0800, Christoph Weber wrote:
> Has anyone had a chance to run VMD under MS Vista and can comment on
> performance?
> Published benchmarks seem to indicate dismal OpenGL performance
> (see http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/page6.html ).
> For this and a variety of other reasons we're recommending to our
> users to stay away from Vista for now. However, I'd like some real
> world stories, rather than synthetic benchmarks.
> I hope to get access to a Vista box soon myself, but for now I have to
> rely on word of mouth.
>
> On a related note:
> Does anyone have news about graphics drivers for Vista which restore
> the lack of hardware OpenGL support?
>
> Thanks,
> Christoph
> --
> | Dr. Christoph Weber Sen. Applications Specialist
> | Research Computing, TPC21 858-784-9869 (phone)
> | The Scripps Research Institute 858-784-9301 (FAX)
> | La Jolla CA 92037-1027 weber_at_scripps.edu
> | http://www.scripps.edu/~weber/
> Most of the guys in Silicon Valley are divorced. Their wives
> just haven't told them yet. -- Dee Cravens 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
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Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349
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