[Chimera-users] gopenmol files in chimera?

[Thomas Goddard]

Hi Grant,

  We don't have the common high-end consumer desktop graphics cards
from the past year in our lab right now.  We either have consumer
cards more than a year old (Radeon 9800 Pro, GeForce 4 Ti vintage) or
workstation cards that are rare (Quadro FX 3400, FireGL X1).  This is
basically what you'll see on our volume data Chimera rendering
benchmarks web page.

	http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/benchmarks.html

  In terms of handling large systems, say 50000+ atoms, Chimera is
slow doing many simple manipulations: selecting, coloring, changing
display style.  This is because Chimera loops over the atoms in Python
code instead of a compiled language like C++, C, or Fortran.  Working
with large models involves alot of these simple actions and I find
that to be the main performance problem using Chimera on large models.
Other molecular graphics programs are faster.  With Chimera a fast CPU
(rather than GPU) can ameliorate this.  A dual CPU system will help by
allowing other task (like X windows) run.  Chimera can only use one
CPU.

      Tom