VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue Dec 20 2005 - 14:54:02 CST

Hi,
  Hi, if the system will be running Windows XP, VMD should run ok with
an ATI card. If it will be running Linux, then the ATI card is a currently
a poor choice. One disadvantage to the ATI cards is that none of the ATI
drivers I've tested support enough of the OpenGL Shading Language to make
VMD happy thus far. It could be that these new ATI cards will do better
in that area, but so far only the NVidia and 3DLabs cards have done well
with OpenGL Shading Language, at least in the testing I've done here.
I believe the price difference between the ATI video and NVidia is fairly
indicative of the difference in performance between these two solutions.
Take a look at this THG performance chart for a rough estimation of the
difference in performance between many of the cards that are currently
available:
  http://images.tomshardware.com/2005/12/02/vga_charts_viii/3dupgrade-big.gif

I don't know where the ATI X600 SE fits into that chart, but even the
X600 XT and Pro cards fall way below the NV 6800 cards on the THG
benchmarks. Beyond that there are various VMD features that the ATI
drivers don't currently don't do well with that the NVidia cards
are at least usable for. Your mileage may vary. If it were me,
and I was building a Windows XP box to run VMD, I'd probably go with
either a 3DLabs Wildcat Realizm, or an NVidia 7800.

I don't know what Jindahl will be running besides VMD, but if VMD will
be the main application, then I'd possibly spend more money on the
graphics board and less money on the CPUs...

  John

On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 03:34:29PM -0500, Michael T. Davis wrote:
> Recently, Jindal Shah wrote...
>
> > Hello,
> > We are planning to buy new computers and want to make sure that VMD with
> > latest features would run properly. The card of choice is:
> >
> > 256MB PCI Express x16 (DVI/VGA/TV-out) ATI Radeon X600 SE HyperMemory
> >
> > Does anybody have any experience with this graphics card?
>
> I am Jindal's IT support and I wanted to follow-up with an answer to one of
> the responses that Jindal received. The systems in question will be running
> Windows XP Pro on a 3.0GHz Dual Core Pentium D. We could go with an Nividia-
> based system, but for an equivalently configured system in all other respects,
> it's going to cost $600 more per system. The Nvidia card in question is...
>
> 256MB PCI Express x16 (DVI/VGA/TV-out) nVidia GeForce 6800
>
> (The vendor has a few different lines of systems and the Nvidia-based system
> comes from a different line than the ATI-based system. The computer system
> architectures are the same.) Are we really going to be able to appreciate
> that much better performance with the Nvidia-based system under VMD?
>
> Thanks,
> Mike 

-- 
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