VMD-L Mailing List
From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed Feb 11 2015 - 10:12:44 CST
- Next message: John Stone: "Re: Handful of rendering issues"
- Previous message: John Stone: "Re: GBIS in NAMD 2.10 CUDA with IMD"
- In reply to: Tristan Croll: "Handful of rendering issues"
- Next in thread: Tristan Croll: "Re: Handful of rendering issues"
- Reply: Tristan Croll: "Re: Handful of rendering issues"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
Hi,
On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 11:15:19AM +0000, Tristan Croll wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I have a few minor rendering-related issues/suggestions in VMD 1.9.2:
>
> - If I have an isosurface visualised in the default point representation
> and switch to GLSL rendermode, every point becomes a VERY large sphere and
> the system slows to a crawl.
What kind of GPU are you using? The point rendering in this case should be
relatively harmless on a normal GPU. I wonder if there's a bug in the video
driver affecting you there.
> - When a wireframe is rendered in Tachyon the lines are of course replaced
> by thin cylinders. This works out nicely in the CPU-only Tachyon
> (particularly if I use a transparent material, yielding a nicely
> unobtrusive mesh), but the cylinder diameter is much larger in
> Tachyon-OptiX. Is it possible to shrink this, or is this one of the
> trade-offs that allows the renderer to be so blazingly fast?
There are still a lot of minor differences between the full Tachyon and the
"light weight" GPU-accelerated version that I've implemented in VMD.
The behavior of line rendering on the GPU version leaves something to be
desired, I hope to improve that in the next release, and I will also
implement some of the missing features such as 3-D texturing and
user-defined clipping planes, which are not implemented in the GPU ray tracer
up to this point.
> - When using the interactive renderer, closing the rendering window with
> the mouse rather than pressing Esc or q crashes VMD.
This works fine for me using the final version of VMD 1.9.2.
If you're running a pre-release test version of VMD, you should upgrade
to the final release. If you're running the final version of VMD 1.9.2,
then I'm going to need to know a lot of other details about your machine,
such as what OS version you're running, what window manager, and so on.
The only way I've found to create a scenario similar to what you describe
is to use "xkill" on VMD, which terminates the program abruptly (but that's
the whole point of xkill, so I don't see that as wrong behavior).
> - I think it would be awesome if the interactive renderer had an option to
> render the scene at some multiple of the screen resolution, for when
> poster-quality images are needed.
This is something Axel had suggested early on, but it turns out to be
somewhat trickier than I had originally anticipated, due to the greatly
increased possibility for GPU kernel timeouts. I decided to leave this
feature for the next release so I can work on the code a bit more and
try to decrease the likelihood of GPU kernel timeouts on low-end GPUs.
That said, it's on the TODO list already with many other improvements.
Cheers,
John Stone
vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
>
> Cheers,
>
> Tristan
-- NIH Center for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801 http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/ Phone: 217-244-3349 http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/
- Next message: John Stone: "Re: Handful of rendering issues"
- Previous message: John Stone: "Re: GBIS in NAMD 2.10 CUDA with IMD"
- In reply to: Tristan Croll: "Handful of rendering issues"
- Next in thread: Tristan Croll: "Re: Handful of rendering issues"
- Reply: Tristan Croll: "Re: Handful of rendering issues"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]