[Chimera-users] chimera performance

[Greg Couch]

I have had bad luck with NVidia drivers packaged as RPMs.  Instead I 
recommend that you uninstall the RPM you got from rpmfusion.org and 
install the NVidia driver from NVidia at 
<http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx>.  The "Nvidia.com Binary 
Installer" option given the webpage you cited.  As mentioned there, the 
disadvanatge of NVIdia's driver is that you need to reinstall it every 
time your update your kernel -- otherwise the X server won't start. After 
a successful install (and reboot), glxinfo should tell you which OpenGL 
renderer you have and chimera should work too.

 	Good luck,

 	Greg

On Fri, 8 May 2009, Bala subramanian wrote:

> Dear Greg,
> After installing nvidia graphics drivers, i am not able to open chimera. I
> have attached the xconfig file and the output of glxinfo as text files.
>
> *[cbala at ramana ~]$ chimera
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>  File "/usr/local/chimera/share/__main__.py", line 65, in <module>
>    value = chimeraInit.init(sys.argv)
>  File "/usr/local/chimera/share/chimeraInit.py", line 361, in init
>    tkgui.initializeGUI(exitonquit, debug_opengl)
>  File "CHIMERA/share/chimera/tkgui.py", line 2525, in initializeGUI
>  File "/usr/local/chimera/lib/python2.5/site-packages/PIL/__init__.py",
> line 309, in checkConfig
>
>  File "/usr/local/chimera/lib/python2.5/site-packages/Togl.py", line 27, in
> __init__
>    Tkinter.Widget.__init__(self, master, "togl", cnf, kw)
>  File "/usr/local/chimera/lib/python2.5/lib-tk/Tkinter.py", line 1930, in
> __init__
>    (widgetName, self._w) + extra + self._options(cnf))
> _tkinter.TclError: could not create rendering context
> Couldn't configure togl widget*
>
> I installed the nvidia driver as follows. I installed it based on the
> information given in the nvidia install guide in the following link.
>
> http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-nvidia.html#pci_id
>
> su -c 'rpm -ivh
> http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
> '
> su -c 'rpm -ivh
> http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
> '
> su -c 'rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-*'
> su -c 'yum install kmod-nvidia'
>
> Then i gave the following command
>
> nvidia-xconfig  as root. Then i restarted the system. Now i am able to see
> nvidia display setting. When i give chimera, it dosent work.
>
> Bala
>
> On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 8:44 PM, Greg Couch <gregc at cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:
>
>> Looking at your chimera benchmark scores and at the scores on the web page,
>> http://socrates2.cgl.ucsf.edu/trac/chimera/wiki/benchmarks, it looks like
>> you don't have the NVidia graphics driver installed.  And that would make a
>> *huge* difference.  To double-check, run the glxinfo command and look at the
>> "OpenGL renderer string:" line, it should have NVIDIA in it instead of Mesa.
>>  To get the NVidia drivers, go to <
>> http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx>.
>>
>>         - Greg
>>
>>
>> On Thu, 7 May 2009, Bala subramanian wrote:
>>
>>  Dear Greg,
>>> You are right. Previously it was normal but now it is slow. I havent
>>> updated
>>> the kernel. I checked and noticed that i dnt have any memory intensive
>>> background jobs also.
>>>
>>> I did benchmarks with two chimera versions 1.3 (attached file chim_test)
>>> and
>>> chimera 1.4 (attached chim_test1).
>>> My graphics card is nVIDIA GETFORCE 9300MG, VRAM: 256 MB. I dnt know how
>>> to
>>> compare and judge what is going wrong. I wud appreciate your help on the
>>> same.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Bala
>>>
>>> So it was formerly fast on the same computer?  This could happen on a
>>> Linux
>>>
>>>> computer if you updated the kernel and forgot to reinstall the graphics
>>>> driver (from ATI or NVidia, the open source 3D drivers still need work,
>>>> but
>>>> are improving).  Another possibility, on all operatings sytems, is that
>>>> there is a background process that is using a lot of CPU or memory, so
>>>> chimera doesn't have the resources it used to.
>>>>
>>>> If you just want to check the graphics performance, then you can use the
>>>> Benchmark tool in Tool / Utilities to guage the current performance.  And
>>>> then you can compare to the reported scores to see if your graphics
>>>> performance is reasonable (the Show button in the Benchmark tool brings
>>>> up
>>>> the web page).
>>>>
>>>>       - Greg
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>