Hi Tom, Greg:

Thanks for replying.

I am pretty sure I do have proprietary driver installed.

I checked in the report a bug dialog and got:

OpenGL Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL Renderer: GeForce GTX 560 Ti/PCIe/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 4.2.0 NVIDIA 304.116

However, I was checking if there was anything else that would affect performance, and it looks like my version of chimera has silhouettes and depth cueing on by default. When I turned both those effects off I saw some pretty big improvements in benchmark and real-life performance:

Old molecule benchmarks:
6249.5 158.7 1.5 0.9 27.4 0.4 89.3

New molecule benchmarks:
369581.3 164.7 201.1 130.3 2145.8 51.3 103.3

Which I guess explains the performance differences, unless the benchmarks on the website were with both of those effects on as well. Are there perhaps any other effects I could be on the lookout for that would also drain performance when dealing with millions of atoms?

Cheers,
Dan

On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 4:59 PM Tom Goddard <goddard@sonic.net> wrote:
You probably don’t have the Nvidia graphics driver installed, so you are getting slow Mesa rendering.  To check this use Chimera menu Help / Report a Bug… and look in the “Gathered Information” box where it will identify the OpenGL renderer.  For instance on my Mac it says:

OpenGL Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL Renderer: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX OpenGL Engine
OpenGL Version: 2.1 NVIDIA-10.4.2 310.41.35f01

  Tom


> On Aug 12, 2015, at 11:53 PM, Dan Lin wrote:
>
> Hello:
>
> I was wondering if anyone had any experience tracking down performance problems in chimera.
>
> I've noticed that I am getting really sluggish performance when managing a lot of atoms, even when everything is shown as backbone traces only.
>
> To take a look at the performance, I ran the benchmark and got the following numbers:
>
> Volume benchmark scores
>  surface    mesh  contour  solid  recolor
>      981    1291     280     589     393
>
> Null  Wire    Stick   BStick  Ribbon  Sphere  Ops
> 6249.5        158.7   1.5     0.9     27.4    0.4     89.3
>
>
> compared to a benchmark posted on the website of the same graphics card:
>
> 2125 2026 302 512 491
>
> 213 492 452 3259 169 128
>
> Apparently I'm getting awful benchmarks for most of the molecule benchmarks, while the volume performance is pretty comparable. I re-ran the molecule benchmarks to make sure they were reproducible and got pretty much the same numbers.
>
> Would anybody have any suggestions for figuring out what's going on?
>
> For reference, I'm running ubuntu 12.04 with up to date nvidia drivers for a GTX 560 Ti.
>
> Thanks,
> Dan
>
>
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