From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Thu Apr 15 2021 - 11:38:02 CDT

Jason,
  There shouldn't be crashes on the older GPUs, even with things like
mirror reflection being used. It's possible that on a 960M one might
run short on GPU memory, but I'm still surprised you're getting a crash.
What driver version are you running on that machine? Does VMD print any
errors when this crash you've described occurs?

Best,
  John Stone

On Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 04:26:05PM +0000, Jason Smith wrote:
> My Apologies,
>
> I just tested 1.9.4a51v6 on a 960M (while John was writing his reply) and
> both in-memory and interactive tachyon-optix works fine, so long as you
> aren't attempting to use RT-based effects like mirror (which leads to a
> crash-to-desktop).
>
> Cheers,
>
> -
> Jason Smith
> Post-Doctoral Fellow
> Robert N. Young Lab, Simon Fraser University
> 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A-1S6
> Canada
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> From: Jason Smith
> Sent: Thursday, 15 April 2021 9:08:29 AM
> To: John Stone; Geist, Norman
> Cc: Nikhil Maroli; Vmd L
> Subject: Re: vmd-l: Rendering using GPU
>
>
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but ray tracing with Optix requires the ray
> tracing cores present on 2000 and later series NVidia GPUs.
>
> Cheers,
>
> -
> Jason Smith
> Post-Doctoral Fellow
> Robert N. Young Lab, Simon Fraser University
> 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A-1S6
> Canada
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> From: owner-vmd-l_at_ks.uiuc.edu <owner-vmd-l_at_ks.uiuc.edu> on behalf of John
> Stone <johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu>
> Sent: Thursday, 15 April 2021 8:20:42 AM
> To: Geist, Norman
> Cc: Nikhil Maroli; Vmd L
> Subject: Re: vmd-l: Rendering using GPU
>
> Hi,
> When VMD starts up, it automatically detects NVIDIA GPUs
> that support CUDA and OptiX (OptiX is the ray tracing development
> framework I used to write the existing lightegith GPU version of Tachyon).
> If you've got up-to-date NVIDIA drivers, you should see a VMD startup
> message
> that looks similar to this:
>
> Info) Detected 3 available TachyonL/OptiX ray tracing accelerators
> Info) Compiling OptiX shaders on 3 target GPUs...
>
> If no OptiX-capable GPUs are seen by VMD, then you won't see the
> various "TachyonL-OptiX" renderers listed in in the File->Render menu.
>
> Best regards,
> John Stone
>
> On Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 10:45:48AM +0200, Geist, Norman wrote:
> > Use renderers with optix in their names.
> >
> > Am Donnerstag, den 15-04-2021 um 09:31 schrieb Nikhil Maroli:
> >
> > Dear All,
> > I am having 3 x 1070 with a 2 x 12 core processor. I have
> installed VMD
> > for CUDA versions. When I load VMD I can see it uses 700Mb from the
> > card, however rendering always running on the processor.
> > Can anyone tell me how I use cards for rendering purposes
> > Nikhil
> > --
>
> --
> NIH Center for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
> Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
> University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
> [1]http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/ Phone: 217-244-3349
> [2]http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/
>
> References
>
> Visible links
> 1. http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/
> 2. http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/

-- 
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/