Hi Tom, Thanks for your response. Let me clarify it in my following embedded comments. On 3/12/13, Tom Goddard <goddard@sonic.net> wrote:
Hi Jupiter,
Chimera tries to use modern OpenGL features: shaders, vertex buffers, instancing, .... It disables some of those features known to be buggy in mesa. If you start chimera --debug-opengl you can disable more OpenGL features with a start-up dialog.
I see the debug dialog, but did not change things if I disable some opengl features.
You said in your first email that Chimera ran with "very poor performance when using mesa". It would be helpful to give an explicit example (e.g. opening PDB yyyy the model rotates at about z frames per second).
Chimera can be used in mesa, but only in mesa DRI driver. If I click Tools->Demo-> COX Inhibitors Demo in Mesa DRI driver, a 3D structure can rotate relatively good. But if I changed to use Mesa Xlib driver, the performance is significantly deteriorated, the 3D structure could no longer rotate, instead of drawing line by line. This was my main question why it could perform 3D rending in Mesa DRI driver, but very poor in Mesa xlib driver. Most OpenGL applications work in both mesa DRI and xlib drivers. Is there any workarounds we could do to run Chimera in mesa Xlib driver?
Does your X11 VNC render OpenGL using the client graphics driver? It might just send the OpenGL to the client (ie. displaying) system in which case performance would depend on the graphics driver of that system. Performance can be dismal in such a situation because OpenGL queries have to make a roundtrip across the network connection.
Let me clarify it, I am doing the testing in a local machine, running Chimera with either Mesa DRI driver or xlib driver. No VNC connection, no network issues. The hardware is normal graphic driver using mesa DRI or Xlib. There was no hardware acceleration, no GPU. Thank you. Kind regards, Jupiter