[Chimera-users] benchmark scores

[Waterman, DG (David)]

Many thanks to Tom and Greg for their information on the Nvidia NVS
cards. I think I have a strong case to make to my employer to upgrade
some machines - at least those of postdocs who need to make pictures for
papers!
Cheers
David

-----Original Message-----
From: Greg Couch [mailto:gregc at cgl.ucsf.edu] 
Sent: 05 September 2007 21:23
To: Tom Goddard
Cc: Waterman, DG (David); chimera-users at cgl.ucsf.edu
Subject: Re: [Chimera-users] benchmark scores

On Wed, 5 Sep 2007, Tom Goddard wrote:

>  I've seen two machines (laptops) with Nvidia NVS graphics cards that 
> had relatively low Chimera graphics rendering scores.  Greg Couch, a 
> Chimera developer says the NVS cards are intended for 2 dimensional 
> graphics.  The graphics was much faster on one of the machines after 
> changing some driver settings.  I think one change was to turn "triple

> buffering" off but I'm not sure that is what improved the speed.
> Perhaps Greg remembers what changes on John Irwin's machine improved 
> the speed.
>
>    Tom

The change was to reset the driver settings to their defaults.  As for
any graphics card with limited memory, do not turn on memory consuming
options unless you need them.  So for a Quadro NVS, turn off
antialiasing, turn off triple buffering, turn on unified back/depth
buffer, turn off stereo, and turn off overlay.  Turning off antialiasing
will have the biggest effect on performance -- you can turn it off on
the chimera command line with the --nomultisample option instead of
modifying the driver settings.

 	- Greg
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