[chimerax-users] Macbook Pro, fans, and ChimeraX

Lewis James martin ljmartin at hey.com
Tue Jan 24 20:22:48 PST 2023


Hi all, 
Ever since I got my Macbook Pro (16-inch, 2019, 2.3GHz 8‑core Intel Core
i9) I noticed the fans can go full bore for seemingly small tasks.
ChimeraX is one of those - swinging a protein view around is enough to
set them off, and Activity Monitor reports around 200% usage for the
"UCSF ChimeraX" process. I can see that GPU usage on the inbuilt AMD
Radeon Pro 5500M can get up to about 50%, too. The bottom can get quite
hot - it's Summer here now, but this happens in Winter too. 

A couple of questions:
- Is this expected (for ChimeraX, not generally)? Do other people
experience this? 
- Does ChimeraX use the GPU for rendering? If so, what's driving the CPU
spike when I move the protein on screen? Is it just from calculating the
coordinate rotations?

Thanks, 
Lewis
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