Hi, On multiple tests of the contour benchmark under WinXP I get anywhere from 108 to 120 with the mode being 115 or 116. Under linux I always get a score of 146 no matter how many times I run it consecutively. ..Sabuj Thomas Goddard wrote:
Hi Sabuj,
I'm surprised how different your Chimera benchmark scores are running Windows versus Linux on the same machine.
Chimera-1.2143, WinXP SP1, ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 (128MB), driver 6.14.10.6436, ECS G736 laptop, 1G RAM, P4 3.2GHz
Linux: surface 181 mesh 181 contour 146 solid 244 recolor 118 Windows: surface 350 mesh 150 contour 110 solid 208 recolor 70
The graphics drivers can make a big difference in the Surface / Mesh scores. I believe this has to do with the rules the graphics driver uses to decide whether to put the surface geometry in the graphics card memory (fast), or shuttle it from the main computer memory for each drawing (slow).
The difference you see in contouring scores (146 vs 110) is hard to fathom. This is not using any graphics -- it is just a calculation done on the computer CPU. Do you get close to the same number if you run the benchmarks twice? It could be that Windows is much slower at allocating memory -- that is also done during the contour calculation.
I would definitely *not* add the scores to get an overall measure of performance. Some may be much more important to you than others. Surface and contour are probably most important for looking at density maps. Surface is probably most important for looking at large molecular models. Recolor is relatively unimportant (it concerns recoloring of solid volume renderings).
The benchmark code works by increasing the volume data set size until the drawing or contour calculation speed drops below 10 times per second (considered "interactive"). Then uses bisection to find exactly what size volume data set can be handled at 10 frames per second.
See the Chimera User's Guide page for more info about the benchmarks. It's in the Tools section under Benchmark.
http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/ContributedSoftware/benchmark/benchmark...
We are currently enhancing the benchmarking tool to time display of molecular models.
Tom