Blocky artifacts in images

[gmartin@…]

Hi,
When saving images of models in chimeraX, I get weird blocky artifacts around the models in the saved image.  This also happens with maps and surfaces I believe.  The issue persists in any lighting mode (soft, full, flat, etc).  Example image below.  The computer is a Macbook Pro 13inch from 2020.  I’ve noticed this with multiple versions of ChimeraX.  Also this doesn’t seem to occur with older MacOS versions (Sierra).
The command:

save ~/Desktop/Model-side.png width 2000 height 2000

MacOS version: Ventura 13.3.1
ChimeraX version: 1.6.1

[cid:image001.png@01DA132B.EBAD3710]

*******
Gregory M. Martin, PhD
Staff Scientist
Lab of Dr. Andrew Ward
Dept. of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology (ISCB)
The Scripps Research Institute
La Jolla, CA 92037

[gmartin@…]

Added by email2trac

[Eric Pettersen]

Reported by Greg Martin

[Tom Goddard]

That looks like a graphics driver problem. It would be useful if you used ChimeraX menu Help / Report a Bug... since that would give me exact info about your MacBook Pro. There are one or two models with Intel graphics that seem to have all the graphics driver problems. Unfortunately Apple deprecated the community standard OpenGL graphics library that ChimeraX relies on when they introduced their Metal graphics 5 years ago so they are not likely to fix this for your machine. But I have never seen graphics problems on the Mac M1 or M2 machines.

I guess the specific problem is when you turn on silhouette edges. It looks like somehow the depth buffer is extremely coarse so the edges are blocky. But also there is the junk at the bottom.

Does the problem go away when you turn of silhouette edges?

Sadly there is nothing we can do. The only choice is to save the image on a machine with working graphics driver. You can save a ChimeraX session, copy it to another machine and save the image.

Maybe you can get your boss to buy you a Mac M3 laptop to fix this.