[Chimera-users] ATI catalyst 5.7 drivers with R9600SE video card crash winxp when creating surfaces (or running surface benchmark) in chimera-1.2143

[Sabuj Pattanayek]

Hi,

On multiple tests of the contour benchmark under WinXP I get anywhere 
from 108 to 120 with the mode being 115 or 116.

Under linux I always get a score of 146 no matter how many times I run 
it consecutively.

..Sabuj

Thomas Goddard wrote:
> Hi Sabuj,
> 
>   I'm surprised how different your Chimera benchmark scores are running
> Windows versus Linux on the same machine.
> 
> 
>>Chimera-1.2143, WinXP SP1, ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 (128MB), driver 
>>6.14.10.6436, ECS G736 laptop, 1G RAM, P4 3.2GHz
>>
>>Linux:   surface 181  mesh 181  contour 146  solid 244  recolor 118
>>Windows: surface 350  mesh 150  contour 110  solid 208  recolor 70
> 
> 
> The graphics drivers can make a big difference in the Surface / Mesh
> scores.  I believe this has to do with the rules the graphics driver
> uses to decide whether to put the surface geometry in the graphics
> card memory (fast), or shuttle it from the main computer memory for each
> drawing (slow).
> 
> The difference you see in contouring scores (146 vs 110) is hard to
> fathom.  This is not using any graphics -- it is just a calculation done
> on the computer CPU.  Do you get close to the same number if you run the
> benchmarks twice?  It could be that Windows is much slower at allocating
> memory -- that is also done during the contour calculation.
> 
> I would definitely *not* add the scores to get an overall measure of
> performance.  Some may be much more important to you than others.
> Surface and contour are probably most important for looking at density
> maps.  Surface is probably most important for looking at large molecular
> models.  Recolor is relatively unimportant (it concerns recoloring of
> solid volume renderings).
> 
> The benchmark code works by increasing the volume data set size until
> the drawing or contour calculation speed drops below 10 times per second
> (considered "interactive").  Then uses bisection to find exactly what size
> volume data set can be handled at 10 frames per second.
> 
> See the Chimera User's Guide page for more info about the benchmarks.
> It's in the Tools section under Benchmark.
> 
> 	http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/ContributedSoftware/benchmark/benchmark.html
> 
> We are currently enhancing the benchmarking tool to time display of
> molecular models.
> 
>   Tom