VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue May 20 2003 - 10:55:24 CDT

Hi Dallas,

On Tue, May 20, 2003 at 08:06:30AM +1000, Dallas Warren wrote:
> John,
>
> Thanks for the reply, much appreciated.
>
> I also got a direct reply from someone using the 3DLab Wildcat VP870, they
> are very happy with it, easy to use and install, and recommend it.

If you're planning to run Windows, then yes, that's probably the best
choice since it does stereo and seems to outrun the other cards on several
of the VMD reps we use here.

> > I'm testing an ATI FireGL X1 card in one of our machines here.
> >So far it seems to perform on par with the NVidia Ti 4600 cards on
> >Linux. I haven't tested it on Windows yet. I've got a 3DLabs
>
> Are the Linux drivers good for the X1? From what I can tell that can make
> a large difference in the card performance.

They are ok. I've found bugs in them and reported them, hopefully they've
fixed the things I ran into already. Speedwise its basically neck-and-neck
with the fastest NVidia cards we've got, winning on some things, losing
on others.

> I also got some feedback from someone that is using the X1 for 3D
> Mechanical CAD and finite element analysis software and they think it is
> excellent. They recently replaced their ATI Radeons with this, and
> wouldn't use the Radeons anymore. But this is on a PC.

I have relatively little experience with the Radeons, I got the X1 for
testing use as its supposed to be a more serious board.

> I am currently looking to put together a workstation to perform some MD on
> and visualisation using VMD. Most likely a dual or quad 2.4G Xeon. Most
> of the viewing I do is either as line representations, VDW or Surf. And
> the number of atoms can be rather large. Things struggle a bit on a O2 SGI
> that I currently use.

If you're using an O2 presently, then almost any of the video boards we've
discussed will be a huge improvement over what you're using now. I'll be
curious to hear how well the Xeon box performs with the graphics board you
select. Several of the vendors have had problems with their OpenGL drivers
on SMP machines, so any comments you have about the stability you get on
such machines would be very interesting.

Thanks,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu 

-- 
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