VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed May 26 2010 - 09:46:45 CDT

Hi,
  The problems you're having are due to bugs in the Intel graphics drivers.
In order to get past these issues, you'll need to find a different graphics
driver version that fixes these problems. The Intel graphics drivers for
Linux have been widely known to have problems for several years now.
To be honest, it amazes me that even after all of the time and complaints
that have gone by that very little seems to have changed in regards to
these kinds of problems with their Linux drivers. Both NVIDIA and AMD
have much more reliable graphics drivers on Linux, and they both produce
GPUs that are much more featureful and perform better, so if you have
the means to upgrade your hardware to a different GPU or graphics
chipset, that is what I would recommend first and foremost. Time is too
precious to waste on non-functioning drivers and low performance hardware.
If you can't get upgrade the hardware and you are unable to obtain a driver
that fixes the problem, then I would suggest sticking with Windows, as
Intel seems to put far more effort into making their Windows drivers usable.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 06:29:09PM -0400, Tim Travers wrote:
> Good afternoon,
>
> Sorry for posting twice, just in case the previous one with attached
> screenshots
> is too large to be posted.
> I've been having problems with color rendering when using VMD on a laptop
> with an Intel graphics card. This only occurs when used with linux (I've
> tested
> Fedora 11, Fedora 12, and Ubuntu 10.04), but not when using Windows Vista
> on the same laptop. The main problem is that the color rendering for the
> licorice
> and CPK drawing methods don't work right.
>
> I can send screenshots if needed. Strangely, for the licorice
> drawing, just changing
> the sphere resolution can also cause differences in the color
> rendering with, for instance,
> some bonds changing color from blue to red.
> When using CPK drawing, some C-C bonds are shown in red, some in dark
> blue, and
> others in the normal cyan for name coloring.
>
> I've googled this for some time now, and couldn't find any resolution.
> Just to note,
> I also have this problem with PyMOL's stick rendering (its version of
> licorice). Again,
> both work fine on Windows but not on the linux distros I've tested so far.
> I'm not sure
> if this'll be helpful, but here's the output of glxinfo | grep -i opengl:
>
> OpenGL vendor string: Tungsten Graphics, Inc
> OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) 965GM GEM 20091221 2009Q4
> OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 7.7.1
> OpenGL shading language version string: 1.20
>
> Also, I've tried the three different rendermodes in VMD, to no avail. Is
> there some
> X setting that needs to be maybe tweaked for Intel graphics cards?
>
> Thanks for any help on this problem.
>
> Thanks again,
> Timothy 

-- 
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