VMD 1.8.5 Windows Release Notes

Windows Installation Requirement:

  • Windows XP or Windows Vista as the base operating system.
  • VMD requires a pentium class machine with approximately 256MB of RAM, and a 16-bit color video as a minimally useful configuration. The use of a fast OpenGL hardware accelerated video card is highly recommended.

Installation notes and solution to common problems:

  • Stability issues, corrupted graphics, video driver bugs: If you install VMD successfully, but the program crashes at startup, or behaves erratically, there's an extremely high probability that you have a buggy graphics device driver installed. While extreme forms of these symptoms are a rare occurence, it has been known to happen with computers purchased coincident with the release of brand new graphics chipsets, when drivers are the most buggy. Some users have owned machines for a year and never updated their drivers, and so the first time they run VMD, it encounters the old/buggy driver, sometimes leading to a crash, garbled images on the display, or other symptoms. This is particularly true of video drivers that have sub-standard implementations of OpenGL Shading Language. This type of problem can typically be immediately remedied by visiting the video card vendor's web site and downloading and installing their most up-to-date drivers for your graphics board. (e.g. the ATI, Intel, or NVIDIA web driver update web sites.) If all else fails, it is possible to enable a system-wide environment variable in Windows which will cause VMD to avoid using any advanced OpenGL graphics features, using a minimalistic "safe subset", which will reduce performance but increase stability. This mode can be enabled by adding and setting the environment variable "VMDSIMPLEGRAPHICS" to "1" in the control panel "System Properties" window, in the "Advanced" tab.
  • Special Windows XP x64 (64-bit) installation notes: The standard WinZip/Installshield self-extracting installers encounter a problem with the 64-bit edition of Windows XP. In order to work around this problem, please follow these instructions.
  • Windows Vista Performance (Jan 29, 2007): Tom's Hardware article summarizing early experiences with Vista performance versus XP.
  • Windows Vista OpenGL Performance (Feb, 2007): The OpenGL ARB has posted an article which describes performance issues and their implications resulting from the new Windows Vista display driver model, and the new "Aero" desktop.
  • Windows Vista OpenGL Performance (Jan 29, 2007): Tom's Hardware performance test of Windows Vista graphics drivers The majority of these performance results apply equally to VMD as they do to the video games used in the tests.
  • Windows Vista and stereoscopic display: Initial indications seem to be that Windows Vista will not provide support for stereoscopic display. See the commentary in the 'Two things to watch out for' section of the "NVIDIA: OpenGL on Vista" Siggraph presentation posted here: http://www.khronos.org/developers/library/siggraph2006/OpenGL_BOF/

Stereoscopic Display Information

  • VMD supports quad-buffered frame sequential stereo rendering. Specific information on setting up stereo on PC's can be found among the several links from the web site below. Many of the low-end stereo solutions are not currently capable of working within VMD, but we have are evaluating adding such support into VMD. The web sites below contain good discussions of the hardware and software compatibility issues for stereo, particularly for PC's running Windows.
  • REAL D (formerly StereoGraphics)
  • Stereo3D.com
  • Scitech GLDirect

Limitations of the Windows version of VMD