VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 28 2003 - 08:57:08 CST

Fred,
  In order to get better rendering performance out of VMD, I suggest
that you do two things:
  1) Upgrade your video board. This will make a huge difference.
     Since you're running Linux, the best options are an NVidia GeForce
     or ATI Radeon series card. Any of them will give you wildly better
     performance than you're getting from the stock Intel graphics chipset
     on that machine. Once you get the ATI or NVidia card, you'll need to
     install the ATI or NVidia provided drivers to get peak performance,
     since the Open Source ATI/NVidia drivers that come with XFree86 don't
     provide much (if any) hardware 3-D acceleration.

  2) Run VMD locally on your workstation rather than remotely. Though
     the rendering calculations are done locally in both cases, there's
     still a lot of network overhead (mainly latency) in doing a remote
     OpenGL display with the type and amount of geometry that a program
     like VMD draws.

  3) You do NOT need to upgrade the video board on the server, the
     server is essentially irrelevant, and you should attempt to run
     everything locally on your desktop, for best performance.

  4) Having a second processor won't make much difference in VMD
     rendering performance at this time, unless you are using
     IMD, in which case the multithreaded VMD builds can use the second
     processor for doing network I/O to improve performance.

Let us know if you have more questions.

Thanks,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Mon, Oct 27, 2003 at 06:52:47PM -0500, Fred Salsbury wrote:
>
> Hello --
>
> I have what is probably a naive set of questions, which probably have more
> to do with my lack of knowledge about graphics programs in general.
>
> I am running vmd on a remote server -- where all my data resides -- so
> I am popping the display up on my local machine. I would like to improve
> the performance of VMD, and so I suspect improving the video card would
> be the appropriate thing to do.
> [ Locally, I have RedHat Linux 9.0, an IBM 2.4 GHz P4, and the generic
> video card that come with it [ Intel Extreme Graphics I believe]. On
> the server, there is Redhat Linux 7.3, dual IBM 2.4 GHz xenon, and a generic
> video card. I have 10.0Mbps connection, which will be 100.0Mbps
> eventually]
> So my questions are:
>
> 1) Does vmd work by sending commands from the server to my local machine,
> and then using the resources locally to display the image?
>
> This would seem to be the case from ifconfig which didn't show much
> increase in network traffice while vmd was running, and rotating a large
> molecule seems to impact my machine and not the server.
>
> 2) As such do I need to improve the video card only locally? Or on the
> server as well?
>
> 3) If I improved the video card, would there be much advantage to getting
> a local machine with a second processor?
>
> thanks for any assistance,
>
> cheers
> Fred 

-- 
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