Subject: RE: CCL:video cards for RedHat 7.2

From: Alain Borel <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 07 Mar 2002 08:02:18 +0100 (MET)

On 07-Mar-02 Jim Phillips wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> See http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/current/accelerators.html
> 
> For real 3D acceration under Linux you want an NVidia GeForce something.

Unless you prefere open-source drivers, in which case you'll choose Matrox
or ATI. Nvidia provide their own binary-only driver.

Alain Borel
Institute of Molecular and Biological Chemistry
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology - Lausanne

-- 
Alain Borel
<[email-masked]>

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From: "David Konerding, Ph.D." <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 07 Mar 2002 07:16:37 -0800

>or ATI. Nvidia provide their own binary-only driver.

Neither open source driver provides reasonable hardware acceleration
for transformation and lighting, which is critical when modeling large
structures.  The ATI driver has been trying to add this for some time,
but I don't believe it was ever achieved.

I don't have any problem with closed source drivers as long as they
integrate well into my system and don't cause a problem when I upgrade
to new kernels, etc.

My personal favorite video card on Linux is the ATI FireGL2, which has
very good performance, a "reasonable" price, closed source driver from
ATI, and mostly importantly to me, support for quad buffered stereo on
Linux.  I have tested this card with Chimera and it works wonderfully,
even in situations where I am looking at very large structures (1jj2,
99000 atoms) with smooth ribbons and surfaces.

I also have a GeForce2 MX at home, which I've tested using the nvidia drivers
and it works pretty well- good enough to model moderately large structures
with no visual delay.  No card w/o HW T&L support can do this, even with a fast
CPU (and I want to leave my CPU for other tasks).

Dave