VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed Oct 15 2003 - 14:36:32 CDT

Taeho, VMD-L,
  I've changed various parts of the VMD geometry generation and OpenGL code
and I'm now getting much better performance on my MacOS X test machine which
has one of the Radeon cards that the performance issue I mentioned. Once we
have a MacOS X 10.3 issue taken care of I'll probably have a beta version
available for people to test if they are interested.

Thanks,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Wed, Oct 15, 2003 at 02:58:45PM -0400, taeho.kim_at_utoronto.ca wrote:
> 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 

-- 
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