VMD-L Mailing List

From: TRINH Minh Hieu (mhtrinh_at_gmail.com)
Date: Thu Nov 18 2010 - 06:18:04 CST

Dear VMD users,

In our lab, we would like to buy a new graphic card, the nvidia "Quadro
5000". Before that, we would like to know its performance with VMD.
I created a benchmark script that display a molecule of about 3000 atoms
(pdb id : 1AY1) in Licorice. I use the fps (frame per second) as performance
estimator.
We will be grateful greate if someone have a Quadro 5000 and would spend
some time to run the benchmark script and post FPS that he got.

The script is available at : http://mhtrinh84.free.fr/vmd_benchmark.tcl

What this script do : it will
- download 1AY1.pdb and display it in Licorice
- resize the Display (seems to work only for Linux) to 720x720
- set render to GLSL
- turn off antialias
- turn on Cachemode
- show fps
- turn the molecule around Y axis

Usage :
- Download the script.
- Launch vmd
- In the vmd console, run : source vmd_benchmark.tcl

If you get about 60 fps or more, you can try a bigger molecule, eg 1IGT
(13k atoms) by typing those commands :
set testpdb 1IGT
source vmd_benchmark.tcl

For example, here what I got with 2 differents PCs :
With a Nvidia Quadro FX 4600 :

Info) VMD for LINUXAMD64, version 1.8.8a19 (October 17, 2010)
[...]
Info) Multithreading available, 4 CPUs detected.
Info) Free system memory: 7517MB (94%)
Info) Creating CUDA device pool and initializing hardware...
Info) Detected 1 available CUDA accelerator:
Info) [0] Quadro FX 4600 12 SM_1.0 @ 1.20 GHz, 767MB RAM, KTO
Info) OpenGL renderer: Quadro FX 4600/PCI/SSE2
Info) Features: STENCIL MSAA(16) MDE CVA MTX NPOT PP PS GLSL(OVF)
Info) Full GLSL rendering mode is available.
Info) Textures: 2-D (8192x8192), 3-D (2048x2048x2048), Multitexture (4)

I get :
1AY1 : 60 fps
1IGT : 27 fps

With a Nvidia ION LE :
Info) VMD for LINUX, version 1.8.7 (August 1, 2009)
[...]
Info) Multithreading available, 2 CPUs detected.
Info) Free system memory: 1587MB (91%)
Info) Detected 1 available CUDA accelerator:
Info) [0] ION LE 2 SM_1.1 @ 1.10 GHz, 253MB RAM, KTO, ZCP
Info) Creating CUDA device pool and initializing hardware...
Info) OpenGL renderer: ION LE/PCI/SSE2
Info) Features: STENCIL MSAA(4) MDE CVA MTX NPOT PP PS GLSL(OVF)
Info) Full GLSL rendering mode is available.
Info) Textures: 2-D (8192x8192), 3-D (2048x2048x2048), Multitexture (4)

I get :
1AY1 : 19 fps
1IGT : 5 fps

I think it can be great if everybody post their test so we have a good idea
about performance of graphic cards.

Cheers,

   mhtrinh