VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed May 15 2002 - 11:21:56 CDT

Hi,
  Several of our local users have downgraded their NVidia drivers
to the 1541 revision in search of better stability and have
met with good success with that version of the NVidia drivers.
Now, just to warn others, that old driver may or may not work with
the newest GeForce4 boards, but several people are using that old
driver with good stability. The new drivers seem to be universally
flaky, though VMD seems to trigger their problems much more than
other applications do. I suspect that the implementation of antialiasing
in the new driver is one of the root causes, with VMD anyway.
Unlike most OpenGL apps, VMD defaults to want "everything on", and
tries to acquire an antialiased, stereoscopic, stencil-buffered,
deep Z-bit-depth X visual when it first starts up. Most of the normal
OpenGL apps don't ask for antialiasing, stereo, or stencil buffers, so
I suspect that most of the issues here are specific to apps that
want to use all of those features simultaneously.
For now, I'd recommend trying their 1541 drivers and see if that
cures your problem. The 1541 drivers don't support all of the
OpenGL features found in the newest drivers, but they work, so
its a trade-off. When we find a better driver version for running
VMD, I'll post a note here. In the mean time, I'll add some notes
to the VMD release notes for Linux documenting these issues, so that
people are aware of the potential problems with the bleeding edge
NVidia drivers..

Thanks,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Wed, May 15, 2002 at 05:47:04PM +0200, Stéphane Teletchéa wrote:
> Le Vendredi 12 Avril 2002 19:27, John Stone a écrit :
> > Hi,
> > To my knowledge, there are a very small selection of video boards
> > that provide good hardware acceleration on Linux. The NVida boards
> > provide very good performance on Linux, but you may have to use their
> > older drivers due to stability problems that seem to have cropped up
> > in their recent driver releases.
>
> I'm encountering problems (hard freeze) on my 8.2 Mdk with a nvidivia
> GeForceII MX 400 with drivers 1.0-2880.
> What version do you recommend, on what references do you point the stability
> problems.
> Thanks a lot.
>
> Stef
>
> PS: it never hangs when i don't use vmd ...
> (other gl apps work fine)
> Can i stress it in another way ?
>
> Stef 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349              
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078