Hi Tom and Eric,
  I ran the benchmarks on my macbook and sent the results to Help (and included below).  From my untrained eye, it looks as though there are performance differences.  From the user perspective, as I noted in the previous email, rotating the molecule in the aqua version using the laptop feels jerky.  However, I also did benchmarks on my imac, fairly new one with intel dual 2.8 GHz processors, and they are much closer to each other.  These were also forwarded through Help.
   I did not have the Model Panel open.
Hope this helps.
all the best,
g



macbook dual intel gma950 graphics

aqua
Molecule 1f4h (33805 atoms):
Null Wire Stick BStick Ribbon Sphere Ops
32.5 14.0 3.0 2.8 9.8 1.5 27.8

X11
1F4H (33805):
141.0 56.0 5.0 5.0 73.0 3.0 31.0



iMac  dual intel ATI,RadeonHD2600 graphics

aqua
Molecule 1f4h (33805 atoms):
Null Wire Stick BStick Ribbon Sphere Ops
60.5 60.2 5.5 5.5 15.4 8.6 36.3

X11
1F4H (33805):
8.0 102.0 3.0 3.0 8.0 4.0 39.0



On Jun 2, 2008, at 11:29 AM, Thomas Goddard wrote:

Hi Glenn,

 I compared the molecule rendering speed with Mac X11 and Mac Aqua Chimera snapshots (version 1.2524) and found them to be the same on an Intel Mac PowerBook with Radeon X1600 graphics and on a Power Mac G5 with Radeon ATI 9800 pro graphics.  Here are scores for the G5 system

Aqua
Molecule 1f4h (33805 atoms):
Null Wire Stick BStick Ribbon Sphere Ops
59.8 59.8 3.4 3.7 11.1 6.0 13.4

X11
Molecule 1f4h (33805 atoms):
Null Wire Stick BStick Ribbon Sphere Ops
70.8 86.3 3.4 3.7 9.4 5.9 14.9

(The aqua values are clamped to my display refresh of 60 Hz.)  You could try this on your system using Tools / Utilities / Benchmark.  You can click the "Show individual test controls" checkbutton and press the "Molecule" button to just run the molecule tests.

 If the numbers do come out much different for X11 versus Aqua could you use Help / Report A Bug... to send us the numbers?  Using that dialog will send us the technical specs for your graphics.

Tom





Glenn L. Millhauser

Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry

UC Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz, CA 95064

831 459 2176 voice

831 566 3337 cell

831 459 2935 fax


http://chemistry.ucsc.edu/~glennm

http://www.chemistry.ucsc.edu/faculty/millhauser.html