VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue Apr 09 2002 - 09:57:55 CDT

Hi,
  We have seen similar problems with the recent NVidia drivers.
The problems seem to be completely independent of the versions
VMD itself as best I can tell.

NVidia has a "Linux driver discussion forum" where one can post notes
about this sort of problem, we've started doing this, in order to get them
to fix the problems with their drivers, I'd strongly recommend that
you describe your problems to them on their board here:
  http://www.nvnews.net/forum/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=57

In particular, mention that you see the resize problem with multiple
OpenGL applications. I'd recommend giving them a list of the applications
you tried that had problems. I'm planning on describing problems we've
seen here that are similar to the ones you describe, as well as a few
others we've run across.

My only suggestion at this time, beyond posting to the NVidia discussion
forum is to try changing the AGP settings in your XFree86 config files..
This helped me cure the problem on my GeForce 3 at home. It didn't help
one of the newer GeForce 3 Ti boards here at work, but just a suggestion.

I've heard from others that this problem (and others) occurs on
the new GeForce 4 cards as well.

  John

On Tue, Apr 09, 2002 at 04:37:11PM +0300, Mikko Huhtala wrote:
> I'm using the precompiled DRI/OpenGL package of VMD 1.7.1 on a RH
> Linux 7.2 box equipped with a Geforce 3 card. The build of the NVidia
> 1.0 drivers is 2802 and the kernel is stock (Tosatti) 2.4.18. The
> graphics window of VMD works, but sometimes gets thrashed or worse
> when the window is resized. Resizing the window right after launch,
> before any molecules are loaded, thrashes the 3d display every time,
> but usually this can be recovered by resizing the window again. During
> a session, when there are molecules in the 3d window, resize
> operations seem to randomly either work, thrash the window until the
> next resize, crash VMD, hang X or even crash the whole system. VMD
> 1.7.0 suffers from the same problems.
>
> The same NVidia driver seem to be ok on a Geforce 1 card, although I
> only tested very briefly. I have seen thrashing of some windows when
> using other OpenGL applications with the 2802 drivers and Geforce 3,
> but never system crashes.
>
> Anyone else with experiences of 1.7.1 and build 2802 of NVidia
> drivers?
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Mikko Huhtala 

-- 
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