VMD-L Mailing List

From: taeho.kim_at_utoronto.ca
Date: Wed Oct 15 2003 - 13:58:45 CDT

Thanks to your previous quick reply (2days ago), I enjoy rendering with VMD.
Your suggestion (display-axes-off) and the detailed information below are
really helpful. Cheers,

Taeho Kim

John, I am sure that you can remember a guy from Toronto carrying Mac iBook
during Summer School. That's me. Anyways, thank you for many things.
 
Quoting John Stone <johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu>:
> Dear VMD-L,
> I've found the source of the performance problems with the Axes
> display on MacOS X. Apple's implementation of gluSphere() combined with
> glNewList()/glEndList is VERY VERY slow. I'll skip going into details on
> this for now until I've got a solution, but the upshot is that their
> implementation of these routines (as a group) runs about 10-20 times
slower
> than on any other OpenGL implementation I've ever tested. This could be
> for
> any number of reasons, so I can't damn them for it, but it does mean I'm
> going
> to have to change some code in VMD. The Axes are only one particular case
> the triggers this performance problem. I hope to have a fix in VMD 1.8.2
> that will eliminate this problem in all of the common cases. In all
> honesty
> though, I'm amazed this sequence of calls runs so slowly on MacOS X.
> For now, leave Axes turned off and most people will get good rendering
> performance from VMD with the Apple's recent OpenGL drivers.
>
> Thanks,
> John Stone
> vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
>
> On Tue, Oct 14, 2003 at 02:11:26PM -0400, taeho.kim_at_utoronto.ca wrote:
> > Hi
> > I am wondering whether the performance of VMD would be affected by a new
> ver
> > of Mac OSX, 10.2.8. Our Mac OSX has been upgraded to 10.2.8 and I
realized
>
> > that reading trajectories including rendering seemed much slower on
10.2.8
>
> > than 10.2.6. (i.e. it might take a second to read a frame.) I appreciate
> any
> > information on this. Thanks,
> > Taeho
>
> --
> 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
> 

-- 
Taeho Kim
Dept. of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry 
Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering 
University of Toronto
taeho.kim_at_utoronto.ca