VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue Jun 22 2010 - 09:00:38 CDT

Hi,
  If your old machine has a dedicated AMD or NVIDIA GPU it would
undoubtably outperform the integrated Intel graphics on your laptop.
These Intel integrated graphics chips really aren't very usable for
games or for graphics intensive programs like VMD. I would expect
the graphics hardware integrated into the Intel i processors to be
even slower yet, due to very limited bandwidth to main memory.
Real GPUs have their own graphics memory and have memory bandwidths
up around 100 GB/sec, but the best CPUs out there have memory bandwidths
below 20 GB/sec, and up to now they weren't sharing it with the graphics
hardware. I would strongly suggest that people avoid buying machines
with these kinds of integrated graphics, while they may work for playing
movies and some very lightweight graphics applications, they are
absolutely a dead-end for molecular visualization, and particularly
for large complexes.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 09:34:40AM -0400, Yangyang Shen wrote:
> Hi, thanks for your help.
>
> VMD prints the following message ..
> Info) Multithreading available, 4 CPUs detected.
> Info) Free system memory: 2047MB (100%)
> Info) OpenGL renderer: Intel(R) HD Graphics
> Info) Features: STENCIL MDE CVA MTX NPOT PP PS GLSL(OVF)
> Info) Full GLSL rendering mode is available.
> Info) Textures: 2-D (4096x4096), 3-D (256x256x256), Multitexture (8)
> Info) Spaceball driver not installed. Spaceball interface disabled.
> Info) No joysticks found. Joystick interface disabled.
> Found 68 plugins or data handlers in directory
> 'C:/Program Files/University of Illinois/VMD/plugins/WIN32/molfile'.
> vmd >
>
> My system has more than 100K atoms, and I was able to view the trajectory
> on my old computer (maybe it has better graphics chip from NVIDIA).
>
> I really hope the new Intel i series CPUs have an OK graphics integrated.
> Could you advice me how to check and fix what might be misconfigured?
> Thanks a lot!
>
> Yangyang
>
>
> On Mon, 21 Jun 2010, Axel Kohlmeyer wrote:
>
> >On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 11:08 PM, Yangyang Shen <yyshen_at_rci.rutgers.edu>
> >wrote:
> >>Hi,
> >>
> >>I just installed VMD 1.8.7 Windows OpenGL version on my laptop, but the
> >>display is slow, even freeze itself, when I try to rotate the molecules.
> >>Does anyone know what might be the problem?
> >>
> >>My laptop is a Dell Latitude E5410 with Intel Core i5 @ 2.4GHz and 3GB of
> >>RAM. I'm not sure about the graphic card, though.
> >
> >vmd prints a message about the detected graphics into the console window.
> >
> >please cut and paste.
> >
> >>Does anyone have similar problem? Please share your solution. Thanks a
> >>lot!
> >
> >if you have slow graphics chip, there is little that you can do.
> >if it is misconfigured, you need to fix it.
> >
> >chances are, that you have intel chipset graphics,
> >and those are slow. how slow also depends a lot
> >on how complex a visualization you have.
> >
> >please provide an example.
> >
> >cheers,
> > axel.
> >
> >>--------
> >>Yangyang Shen
> >>Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering
> >>Rutgers University
> >>732-445-2049
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> >--
> >Dr. Axel Kohlmeyer akohlmey_at_gmail.com
> >http://sites.google.com/site/akohlmey/
> >
> >Institute for Computational Molecular Science
> >Temple University, Philadelphia PA, USA.
> > 

-- 
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