[Chimera-users] Frame rate drop with viewing panel open

[Tom Goddard]

Hi Daniel,

  Rendering the Side View takes about the same amount of GPU processing as rendering the main window, so when you show the Side View you are using twice as much GPU and it will slow down if you have enough models open so your GPU can only render 60 times a second then adding the Side View will drop it to 30 frames per second.  But the 60 frames per second you see is because Chimera targets 60 since that what typical desktop displays refresh at.  Maybe you have large molecules or slow graphics, or don't have a good graphics driver installed.  On a 2019 MacBook Pro with Radeon Vega 20 graphics and Chimera 1.14 the 60000 atom PDB 1aon with initial ribbon display rotates at 60 frames per second but if I show Side View rotation drops to about 40 frames per second.  With a nice graphics card like an Nvidia RTX 2070 I expect it would easily maintain 60 frames per second with hundreds of thousands of atoms.

  To see what graphics driver Chimera is using use Help / Report a Bug.

	Tom


> On Mar 16, 2020, at 7:40 PM, Daniel P Farrell <danpf at uw.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I've been using chimera for a long time now, and I always thought there was some sort of memory leak because it was so slow after 30+ minutes of usage.
> 
> Today I started a new session and somehow discovered it wasn't a memory leak, but the viewing panel!
> 
> This is on Ubuntu 18.10
> 
> I'm 'guessing' it's the side view sapping some computational power? but my CPUs aren't maxed out, and my GPU is also showing low usage so it must be some strange bug.
> 
> Here i load the benchmark window and set it to continuously measure frame rate:
> >>> happily twirling large structure + lots of molecules
> Frame rate: 61.6
> Frame rate: 60.0
> Frame rate: 60.0
> Frame rate: 60.0
> Frame rate: 59.9
> Frame rate: 60.0
> Frame rate: 60.0
> Frame rate: 60.0
> Frame rate: 60.0
> Frame rate: 60.0
> Frame rate: 60.0
> Frame rate: 60.0
> Frame rate: 60.0
> Frame rate: 60.0
> Frame rate: 59.9
> Frame rate: 60.0
> Frame rate: 59.8
> >>> open viewing panel by clicking 'side view' icon on sidebar + continue twirling 
> Frame rate: 29.6
> Frame rate: 27.1
> Frame rate: 11.8
> Frame rate: 19.4
> Frame rate: 19.7
> Frame rate: 19.7
> Frame rate: 24.0
> Frame rate: 30.0
> 
> Even though I know ChimeraX is the main focus now, I would love this to get fixed!
> 
> ~Dan
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