VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Fri Oct 28 2011 - 14:28:21 CDT

Gianluca,
  Thanks for sharing your recent laptop experience. I'm happy to hear
that the AMD drivers are now working much better on Linux. Can you send
me your VMD startup messages? I would also like to have you do some testing
for me with the beta versions of VMD 1.9.1 to see how some of the new
graphics features work on the AMD GPU under Linux.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 05:48:32PM -0700, Gianluca Interlandi wrote:
> Dear VMD users,
>
> A while ago I bothered this list asking for recommendations for a
> lightweight laptop to buy which would support a decent 3D acceleration in
> order to use VMD in presentations. I wanted to briefly update here on my
> experience.
>
> After a lot of waiting and searching I decided to go for a Thinkpad X120e
> which has a dualcore AMD E-350 CPU, a Radeon HD 6310 graphics card and a
> 11.6-inch matte screen. I installed openSUSE 11.4 and the AMD Catalyst
> driver 11.9 for the graphics card. So far I have tested it with glxgears
> and VMD. Before installing the proprietary driver, i.e., using the driver
> provided in the openSUSE installation (probably the opensource driver), I
> got a maximum of 260 frames per second (fps) (this is already almost twice
> faster than the 150 fps that I get on my Thinkpad T23 with Savage S3 card
> and 3D turned off). It was not possible to switch the glxgears window to
> full resolution using the opensource driver.
>
> However, after installing the catalyst driver I got up to 2248 fps with
> the default sized window and up to 426 fps with full blown window. This is
> in my view acceptable for such a small laptop. VMD runs flawlessly. I
> loaded a 400 AA protein complex and I can rotate it with no stutter using
> the surface or VDW representation.
>
> As a tip, I used Sebastian Siebert's script to install the ATI catalyst
> driver in openSUSE 11.4:
>
> http://www.sebastian-siebert.de/2011/09/28/opensuse-proprietaeren-grafik-treiber-amd-catalyst-11-9-als-rpm-installieren/
>
> It's in german, but it's pretty easy to follow. Just scroll down until you
> get to "Empfohlene Vorgehensweise:" and copy paste the commands into a
> shell as root.
>
> If you have any questions, please e-mail me off-list.
>
> Gianluca
>
> -----------------------------------------------------
> Gianluca Interlandi, PhD gianluca_at_u.washington.edu
> +1 (206) 685 4435
> http://artemide.bioeng.washington.edu/
>
> Postdoc at the Department of Bioengineering
> at the University of Washington, Seattle WA U.S.A.
> ----------------------------------------------------- 

-- 
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