VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Thu May 28 2009 - 19:32:44 CDT

Axel,
  Are the open source "radeon" ATI drivers being kept up to date, or are
they a dead-end now? I looked at the list of supported chips on the front
page of the Wiki and all of the new chips are noticably absent from
the list. These drivers might be adequate for normal X, but clearly
they're falling far short on the OpenGL side of things, at least
with sophisticated apps like VMD. The list of hardware supported by the
ATI/AMD proprietary "fglrx" drivers seems much much more complete and
up-to-date.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 08:05:48PM -0400, Axel Kohlmeyer wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-05-28 at 15:13 -0500, John Stone wrote:
> > Hi,
> > This looks like a video driver problem. What video chipset or
> > GPU do you have in this machine? It looks like you've got Mesa
>
> john, "S",
>
> this is an ATI radeon R300 chipset (we have one card of that type
> here in the CMM, IIRC). there is a wiki describing ATI card support
> under linux at:
> http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Open_source_drivers
> since AMD is now making documentation available, the open source
> drivers should have improved significantly since 2006...
>
> there also should be a "legacy" version of the proprietary
> fglrx driver for this chipset from AMD at:
> http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx
>
> > as your video driver, which means you're not getting any hardware
> > acceleration, and things like GLSL probably won't work correctly.
> > Can you get an updated driver for your machine?
>
> since the fglrx drivers have always been a bit ticklish
> it may still be required to disable advanced OpenGL via
> setting VMDSIMPLEGRAPHICS to 1.
>
> cheers,
> axel.
>
> >
> > Cheers,
> > John Stone
> > vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
> >
> > On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 03:45:10PM -0400, snoze pa wrote:
> > > Hi There,
> > > I am using vmd in Linux fedora 10 but it crashes with following
> > > messages! Any Help?
> > > Thank you.
> > > S
> > >
> > > Info) VMD for LINUXAMD64, version 1.8.7beta3 (May 18, 2009)
> > > Info) http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/
> > > Info) Email questions and bug reports to vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
> > > Info) Please include this reference in published work using VMD:
> > > Info) Humphrey, W., Dalke, A. and Schulten, K., `VMD - Visual
> > > Info) Molecular Dynamics', J. Molec. Graphics 1996, 14.1, 33-38.
> > > Info) -------------------------------------------------------------
> > > Info) Multithreading available, 2 CPUs detected.
> > > Info) Free system memory: 1635MB (81%)
> > > Info) No CUDA accelerator devices available.
> > > Info) OpenGL renderer: Mesa DRI R300 20060815 TCL
> > > Info) Features: STENCIL MDE CVA MTX PP
> > > Info) GLSL rendering mode is NOT available.
> > > Info) Textures: 2-D (4096x4096), 3-D (256x256x256), Multitexture (8)
> > > Segmentation fault
> >
>
> --
> =======================================================================
> Axel Kohlmeyer akohlmey_at_cmm.chem.upenn.edu http://www.cmm.upenn.edu
> Center for Molecular Modeling -- University of Pennsylvania
> Department of Chemistry, 231 S.34th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6323
> tel: 1-215-898-1582, fax: 1-215-573-6233, office-tel: 1-215-898-5425
> =======================================================================
> If you make something idiot-proof, the universe creates a better idiot. 

-- 
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