Rendering takes minutes, Mac Nvidia Geforce GT 330M graphics

[Tom Goddard]

Using the lab Mac laptop (mid 2010 model) with Nvidia Geforce GT 330M graphics (512 Mb) gave extremely slow rendering of molecules in sphere style. I opened 1jj2 100,000 atoms and the machine was frozen for about 3 minutes before it rendered. Then it appeared to try to render again maybe from my previous mouse click where the Apple System menu covered part of the app and took another 2 minutes where the machine was unresponsive. When I was finally able to quit I restarted and tried 10,000 atom 1mtx. It opened in about 30 seconds. I turned on ambient occlusion (command light soft) and it froze the machine for another 3 minutes. It eventually did display correctly. I rotated the model which took about 15 seconds for one step.

We will need to detect this kind of slow software rendering so old machines are not frozen by the software.

[Tom Goddard]

The test lab Mac Pro with Nvidia Geforce GT 120 graphics also is incredibly slow rendering atoms as spheres.

This machine and the lab laptop or running Mac OS Yosemite 10.10.2.

[Tom Goddard]

The Mac Pro machine with GT 120 graphics is a 2009 model.

[Tom Goddard]

The GT 120 graphics has 512 Mbytes of memory.

[Tom Goddard]

Retesting the lab MacBook Pro 2010 model with GT 330M graphics (512 Mb) and Mac OS 10.11.6 showed 2bbv ~9000 atoms was usably fast, opened in a few seconds, 5-10 frames/sec with full lighting, while 1grl (30,000 atoms) took 25 minutes to display, then 1grl took about 60 seconds to rotate 1 frame with full lighting. With 1grl simple lighting took 40 seconds to draw a single frame. So apparently instancing is extremely slow. OpenGL version obtained by ChimeraX is reported as 3.3. May be that we should warn on ChimeraX startup on Mac if only OpenGL 3.3.

[Tom Goddard]

Looks like all 2010 and older Mac machines support only OpenGL 3.3 and all newer ones (including Intel graphics) support OpenGL 4.1.

Would need to test an older OpenGL 4.1 system to see if it suffers the same multi-minute rendering times. If it is limited to Mac OpenGL 3.3 then we could detect and warn about that when ChimeraX starts.

[Tom Goddard]

I also retested test lab Mac Pro desktop 2009 with GT 120 graphics, OpenGL 3.3, Mac OS 10.11.6, took approximately 15 minutes to display 1grl with full lighting. 2bbv was usably fast (few seconds load, 5-10 frames/sec render).

[Tom Goddard]

Both old test machines are still perfectly usable while ChimeraX is hung rendering. Since they have multiple cores, activity monitor shows only 1 core pegged at 100% CPU for ChimeraX.

[Tom Goddard]

Mac Pro (Xeon processors) took 22 seconds to render one frame for 1grl with simple lighting.

[Tom Goddard]

The computers that have these extremely limited graphics seem rare enough now that ChimeraX does not need to detect the problem.