VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Jul 25 2005 - 13:06:13 CDT

Jindal,
  The cause of your performance problem is obvious from the OpenGL
messages. You're using Mesa as your OpenGL renderer, and it's not
clear whether the driver you're using there is providing anything
more than a simple framebuffer interface. My guess is that your
system is falling back to pure software rendering, which explains
the performance problems you're having. You'll need to install
a vendor-provided video driver in order to get hardware acceleration
on your machine if the Mesa driver isn't doing it (and it sounds like
it isn't). 3DLabs, ATI, and NVidia all provide Linux drivers though
you'll have to check to see if your card is supported by their drivers.
If not, then I'd say it's time to consider upgrading your video board
to one that's got hardware accelated rendering support on Linux.

  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Mon, Jul 25, 2005 at 01:58:51PM -0400, Jindal Shah wrote:
> John,
>
> Thanks for your reply. The OpenGL information area (I assume you refer to
> the vmd console panel), there are no errors. Following information is
> generated.
>
> Multithreading available:1 CPU detected
> OpenGL renderer: Mesa DRI Range 128 20030328 AGP 1x
> x86/MMX/SSE2
> Features: RN MTX
> Texture: 2-D (1024x1024) 3-D(256x256x1), Multitexture(2)
>
> Thanks
> Jindal
>
> On 7/25/05, John Stone <johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Jindal,
> > What does VMD print in the OpenGL information area when it first
> > starts up? This is usually very informative. In particular, look
> > to see if you get any warnings like "DRI extension missing on display :0.0
> > "
> > or something of that sort.
> >
> > John Stone
> > vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Jul 25, 2005 at 01:20:58PM -0400, Jindal Shah wrote:
> > > I am running VMD on Linux with Fedora Core 3.0. The graphics is too slow
> > and
> > > the resolution is also note that great. I was wondering if any of you
> > > experience same problem and how to fix this.
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > > Jindal
> >
> > --
> > 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
> > 

-- 
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