On Sun, 1 Jun 2008, Glenn Millhauser wrote:
Hi Folks, I just saw the mac aqua version at the download site and decided to give it a try. Layout looks terrific. However, it seems to move molecules much more slowly than the X windows version. I'm running on a macbook (intel) with inherent limited graphics capabilities, so perhaps that's the problem. Any comments?
So it turns out this is due to chimera asking the graphics to multisample each pixel to improve the image quality (it reduces the jagged edge effect, especially noticable on ribbons and surfaces). This was not implemented in Apple's X11 OpenGL, so we didn't have this problem before. Here are Chimera Aqua benchmark results for a MacBook 2Ghz Core Duo with Intel GMA 650 graphics running OS X 10.4.11: Volume benchmark scores surface mesh contour solid recolor 1 16 157 1 3 Molecule 1f4h (33805 atoms): Null Wire Stick BStick Ribbon Sphere Ops 29.8 7.5 1.6 1.4 4.3 0.3 26.3 And without multisampling: Volume benchmark scores surface mesh contour solid recolor 128 139 156 138 88 Molecule 1f4h (33805 atoms): Null Wire Stick BStick Ribbon Sphere Ops 72.2 41.8 14.1 14.1 26.5 10.2 26.7 So without multisampling, it's 6-100 times faster! Unfortunately, there's no way to give command line arguments when clicking on the chimera icon, so to turn off multisampling for now, you would need to start up a Terminal and type: ./Desktop/Chimera.app/Contents/Resources/bin/chimera --nomultisample That's assuming the Chimera.app is on your personal desktop. Or you could edit the Chimera.app/Contents/Resources/share/chimeraInit.py file so that nomultisample defaults to True instead of False on line 52. We will figure out an alternative solution that by default doesn't ask for multisampling for Intel motherboard graphics (same issue exists with Microsoft Windows). Greg Couch UCSF Computer Graphics Lab