VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Aug 28 2006 - 11:44:38 CDT

Hi Mario,
  I've been on NVidia's case about driver bugs.
On Linux, we've been using driver version 1.0-7676 (August 2005), and
on Windows I've been using version 84.12 (March 2006). The Linux driver
7676 isn't entirely bug free either (depends on which card you have),
but it is the best choice that I've tested for some time. The Windows driver
version 84.12 actually seems to have no bugs as far as VMD goes.

There are active discussion threads on these VMD issues on the NVidia support
bulletin board. NVidia says that the 9xxx series drivers don't have problems
compiling the VMD shaders, but they aren't released yet. Rumor has it that
the 9xxx drivers will appear in the next month or so.

Here are some of my posts (and nVidia responses) regarding these
Linux driver bugs with GLSL:

1.0-8756 (long discussion, with nvidia commentary about 9xxx drivers being
the ones they expect to fix these problems)
  http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=70393&highlight=glsl

1.0-8774 (Yesterday)
  http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=75779&highlight=glsl

  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Mon, Aug 28, 2006 at 04:00:52PM +0200, Mario Valle wrote:
> The following warning appears under 1.8.5 and also 1.8.4b11 on Linux. But afterwards the
> GLSL rendermode seems to work properly.
> Anyone knows a version of Nvidia driver that works reliably?
> Thanks!
> mario
>
>
> Info) OpenGL renderer: GeForce 6800 GS/PCI/SSE2
> Info) Features: STENCIL MSAA(4) MDE CVA MTX NPOT PP PS GLSL(OVF)
> Info) OpenGL shader linkage log:
> Info) Fragment info
> Info) -------------
> Info) Internal error: assembly compile error for fragment shader at offset 3688:
> Info) -- error message --
> Info) line 84, column 9: error: invalid state property
> Info) -- internal assembly text --
> Info) !!ARBfp1.0
> Info) OPTION NV_fragment_program2;
> Info) # cgc version 1.5.0000, build date May 15 2006 13:37:55
>
> ...
>
> Info) # 105 instructions, 5 R-regs, 1 H-regs
> Warning) GPU driver failed to compile shader:
> Warning) /home/cs-vis/apps/vmdlibs/shaders/vmdsphere
> Warning) This GPU/driver is buggy, or doesn't fully implement GLSL.
> Warning) Set environment variable VMDGLSLVERBOSE for more info.
> Info) Basic GLSL rendering mode is available.
> Info) Textures: 2-D (4096x4096), 3-D (512x512x512), Multitexture (4)
>
> And from glxinfo:
> OpenGL vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
> OpenGL renderer string: GeForce 6800 GS/PCI/SSE2
> OpenGL version string: 2.0.2 NVIDIA 87.62
>
> --
> Ing. Mario Valle
> Visualization Group | http://www.cscs.ch/~mvalle
> Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) | Tel: +41 (91) 610.82.60
> v. Cantonale Galleria 2, 6928 Manno, Switzerland | Fax: +41 (91) 610.82.82 

-- 
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