VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue Jan 05 2010 - 08:59:04 CST

Hi,
  Generally speaking, you want to use ribbon or cartoon type
representations for large structures since they generate far less
geometry per atom than reps like VdW, CPK, or Licorice do. That said,
since you're using a recent video card, I would suggest that you try
enabling Display->Rendermode->GLSL and you should get a noticable
performance boost when rendering VdW reps with larger atom counts.

Since VMD is designed to be able to animate time varying MD trajectories,
we don't heavily optimize the display of a single frame for a particular
representation or a single set of coordinates, but another thing you
could try is to enable Display->Cachemode->On to see if that improves
performance or not on your Mac. The display list caching mode captures
as much geometry as possible in a single OpenGL display list, which is
then re-used over and over. This can increase performance significantly
on some combinations of GPUs and scenes.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Tue, Jan 05, 2010 at 10:47:17AM +0100, Matthieu Chavent wrote:
> Dear VMD developpers/users,
>
> I have a mac OSX, octocore with 6 Go of memory with one of the best
> graphic card on mac: an nvidia GTX 285. With this configuration, I have
> still a visualization of big assemblies (as GroEL molecule, ~60000
> atoms, PDB ID 1AON) very slow (around 5 fps) using VdW, Licorice or
> Ball & stick representations. Please could you explain why is it slow
> and/or is there a trick to improve the visualization fps?
>
> Thank you in advance.
>
> Matthieu Chavent 

-- 
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