VMD-L Mailing List

From: Ivo Hofacker (ivo_at_tbi.univie.ac.at)
Date: Mon Aug 30 1999 - 11:01:15 CDT

On 30-Aug-99 John Stone wrote:
> Let us know when you make any new discoveries on the Linux front,
> many people would LOVE to be able to get hardware acceleration on their
> Linux machines for running VMD.

I might add that VMD runs quite nicely on a Matrox G200 using the GLX version
of Mesa from http://www.on.openprojects.net/glx/ (site currently down though).
It's been some 2 months since I tried this, so I don't have compilation
instructions handy. Just make sure you link with the correct GL library (the
one that comes with the glx package instead of libMesaGL).

A few quick tests showed speedups between 1.5 and 2-fold for most
representations. The downside is that, since GLX delegates 3d-rendering to the
X server, the server can become unresponsive (jerky mouse movements etc). While
more mature GLX drivers may help with this, it's particularly annoying with
VMD, because it keeps rerendering the scene as fast as possible even if nothing
changes.

Cheers,
Ivo