Hi Maya, It must be exciting and alot of work to get your lab running. Glad to hear you are making Chimera converts. Graphics benchmark scores using Chimera with the quadro fx 1400 and quadro fx 3400 are shown here http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/benchmarks.html We don't have any numbers for the fx 3450 and I don't know if it is similar to the 3400. The 1400 and 3400 have very similar Chimera scores. The Chimera scores indicate how big a test volume can be handled at 10 frames per second. Both these cards are very fast. The one difference I see is that on the Nvidia web site they say the 1400 has 128 Mbytes of memory while the 3450 has 256 Mbytes. http://www.nvidia.com/page/qfx_mr.html http://www.nvidia.com/page/quadrofx.html (fx 3400) Maybe that info is out of date -- maybe there is a choice of memory size. On the Chimera page the fx 1400 had 256 Mb. And 128 Mbytes is small by today's standards. 256 Mbytes is common, and 512 Mbytes is available with some cards. The amount of graphics memory is most noticable if you use the Chimera "solid" rendering mode because it tries to put red,green,blue 8-bit values for the entire volume on the card. For 256^3 volume that is 48 Mbytes, or if you use Chimera 2-D textures mode (the default) it take 3 times that (144 Mbytes). It can also make a difference for very large contour surfaces -- ones you might use for making a figure but would be too slow for interactive rotating (e.g. 10 million triangles at about 18 bytes per triangle = 180 Mbytes). Regarding stereo, I'm not sure if there are any flat panel displays that can work with the LCD glasses. They don't refresh fast enough so there is too much flicker. So you either need a CRT display or maybe some special high-end flat panel. See you at the EMAN workshop. Maya Topf wrote:
Hi Tom,
How are you? I am slowly settling down in the UK. Lots of work and collaborations. A few people from the EM group at birkbeck started using chimera and they really like it!
I have a question about graphics cards and maybe you can help me. I am thinking about buying either NVIDIA QUADRO FX 1400 (stereo) or FX 3450 (stereo). Do you think that there is a big difference when I want to visualise large maps with chimera for example?
thanks, Maya
I saw that you are coming to the eman workshop so I guess I will see you there!
Tom