From: Christoph Weber (weber_at_scripps.edu)
Date: Fri Jul 14 2006 - 18:35:35 CDT

I also have MacBook Pro with this graphics chip, and have benchmarked
VMD 1.8.4 under both, MacOSX 10.4.6 and Windows XP Pro SP2 on this
laptop. The Mac drivers are generally faster and smoother than the
Windows drivers, although the latter have far more features. Under
Windows I observed jerky frame rates, e.g. jumping up and down between
25 and 32 fps. Under MacOSX with the same scene I had a relatively
consistent 48 fps.
I'll admit that I know virtually nothing about tweaking Windows.

Christoph

John Stone wrote:
> Hi,
> The X1600 is the same chip in the Intel-based Mac I use as a compile
> box, and while it's ok, it's not setting any speed records here either.
> Granted, I'm using it on a Mac and a new version of MacOS X, so there's
> bound to be room for driver improvement, but it's certainly not at all
> comparable to a GeForce 6800 for example. One question for you is what
> resolution you're running at, and what representations you're using.
> You also didn't say what host processor you've got, which while only
> a small part of the performance story does indeed matter for some
> representations, particularly when play trajectories.
>
> John Stone
> vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
>
> On Thu, Jul 13, 2006 at 07:39:59AM -0500, Yu Zhou wrote:
>> Hi there,
>>
>> I recently upgraded my video car to X1600 256M, the lastest product
>> from ATI. However, the rendering speed of this video card is
>> disappointingly low in VMD 1.8.4. The FPS was almost the same as that
>> of a Dell 700M laptop for the same rendering task, while the latter
>> was just using a shabby integrated graphic chip.
>>
>> I've installed the lastest drive for the X1600 and I'm running WINXP
>> PRO SP2 on both two machines. The rendermode was the default OpenGL.
>>
>> Does anyone have anything to say about this?
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Yu Zhou
>>
>> WashU School of Medicine.
>

-- 
|  Dr. Christoph Weber              Sen. Applications Specialist
|  Research Computing, TPC21        858-784-9869 (phone)
|  The Scripps Research Institute   858-784-9301 (FAX)
|  La Jolla  CA  92037-1027         weber_at_scripps.edu
|  http://www.scripps.edu/~weber/
The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four persons
is suffering from some sort of mental illness. Think of your
three best friends -- if they're okay, then it's you.