VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Sat Jan 12 2008 - 00:11:53 CST

Stanley,
  If you just want rendering speed and don't need stereoscopic display,
large video memory for 3-D textures (volumetric rendering),
higher quality line antialiasing, or other features provided
by the professional cards, then the high-end gaming cards are
often adequate for run of the mill trajectory visualization.
Linux is presently a better choice for working with large datasets
in VMD than Windows since we provide 64-bit builds of VMD on Linux already.
Under Windows, the video drivers from multiple vendors are reasonably
usable. Under Linux, only the NVIDIA drivers have been very usable
for VMD historically. I have heard that AMD/ATI is working hard on
improving their Linux support, but I have no firsthand knowledge
of how that's working out with their recent cards. The upcoming
versions of VMD will take advantage of NVIDIA's CUDA to use
GPUs to accelerate calculations as well as for display, so that may
also be worth keeping in mind.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Fri, Jan 11, 2008 at 04:30:59PM -0800, Stanley, Yemin Shi wrote:
> HI, All,
> Anybody know which kind of video card is better for VMD (trajectory analysis), under XP and linux?
> 2D professional NVidia NVIDIA Quadro FX and ATI FIREGL series
> or
> 3D gaming card NIVIDIA 8800 GTS (G92) series
> Thank you
>
> Rgds
> Stanley 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
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