VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Sep 15 2003 - 10:21:50 CDT

Jerome,
  What version of the ATI drivers are you using on your machine?
I have a test machine here with an ATI FireGL X1 that works ok, using
their 3.2.4 drivers. That version of their drivers does still have a
few bugs, but its much more stable than the drivers that the XFree86
team ships, and much better than they were earlier this year.

The actual driver RPM I'm using is:
  fglrx-glc22-4.2.0-3.2.4.i586.rpm

I'd recommend that you get the latest ATI drivers and install them,
it'll probably fix the crashing that you're experiencing. If you're
using the Open Source R300 drivers provided by the XFree86 team, I'd
suggest switching to ATI's driver instead.

Thanks,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 04:04:01PM +0200, Jérôme Hénin wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I had quite a hard time getting ATI's OpenGL acelerated drivers to work on my
> Linux box (FireGL 8800 - ie Radeon 8500). Before that, VMD 1.8.1 worked fine
> and slowly with Mesa rendering.
>
> Now, I got hardware OpenGL, including in VMD :
> Info) OpenGL renderer: Fire GL 8800 128MB DDR Athlon (3DNow!) (FireGL)
> Info) Features: STENCIL RN MDE CVA MTX TCM PP
> Info) Textures: 2-D (2048x2048), 3-D (2048x2048x2048), Multitexture (6)
>
> But if I load a file with more than about 2500 or 3000 atoms, it crashes. (By
> the way, how do you ask VMD for the full debug messages?). If I load a PSF,
> toggle the display off and then load the coordinates, it works. Then, I can
> progressively extend the number of displayed atoms, and at some point, it
> crashes. If I represent a protein using "cartoons", I can go further and
> successfully display more atoms.
>
> Any idea on what's happening?
>
> Jerome 

-- 
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