Graphics cards for Mac
Here's a comparison of Chimera graphics benchmarks for the current standard PowerMac graphics versus the top-of-the-line graphics: Radeon HD 2600 - no additional cost Quadro FX 5600 - $2850 additional cost Surfaces and meshes: 1.8x faster Volume solid style: size 443**3 vs 325**3. Quadro system was limited 32-bit main memory address space. Molecule: Neglible difference for 34000 atom model in wire, stick, ball and stick, ribbon, sphere styles. The Quadro card has 1.5 Gbytes of memory and will probably have significantly higher performance on solid style volume rendering if the Chimera volume display code is optimized. Probably adding more main memory will not help because the limitation is the 32-bit address space (a limit of Mac OS graphical applications). The Quadro card did not correctly display volume data in solid style with 3d textures (solid rendering 2d texture option turned off) -- displayed a chessboard pattern. Did not test 3d textures on Radeon card. Tom
Another take home message is that if you want chimera to run faster drawing molecules, get a faster CPU. This is true for all platforms chimera runs on (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, ...). For example, both the Quadro system and the HD 2600 systems mentioned had 2.8 Ghz CPU's and Apple sells 3.0 and 3.2 Ghz systems for $800 and $1600 additional cost respectively. I would expect the improvement to be roughly linear with the CPU speed change, so +7% and +14%. But we'll have to wait for someone to do the benchmarks to be sure. Being CPU limited is not a feature, but to fix it will take a rewrite of the chimera internals and we're still evaluating how best to do it. Greg Couch UCSF Computer Graphics Lab On Tue, 4 Mar 2008, Tom Goddard wrote:
Here's a comparison of Chimera graphics benchmarks for the current standard PowerMac graphics versus the top-of-the-line graphics:
Radeon HD 2600 - no additional cost Quadro FX 5600 - $2850 additional cost
Surfaces and meshes: 1.8x faster
Volume solid style: size 443**3 vs 325**3. Quadro system was limited 32-bit main memory address space.
Molecule: Neglible difference for 34000 atom model in wire, stick, ball and stick, ribbon, sphere styles.
The Quadro card has 1.5 Gbytes of memory and will probably have significantly higher performance on solid style volume rendering if the Chimera volume display code is optimized. Probably adding more main memory will not help because the limitation is the 32-bit address space (a limit of Mac OS graphical applications).
The Quadro card did not correctly display volume data in solid style with 3d textures (solid rendering 2d texture option turned off) -- displayed a chessboard pattern. Did not test 3d textures on Radeon card.
Tom
Thanks for the valuable info Tom, Greg. Apple advertised 10.5 Leopard as a 64-bit OS top to bottom. Is this not true for the graphics? Can any of the graphics programs running in Leopard access 64-bit memory space? Thanks, Jeff On Mar 4, 2008, at 10:48 AM, Greg Couch wrote:
Another take home message is that if you want chimera to run faster drawing molecules, get a faster CPU. This is true for all platforms chimera runs on (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, ...). For example, both the Quadro system and the HD 2600 systems mentioned had 2.8 Ghz CPU's and Apple sells 3.0 and 3.2 Ghz systems for $800 and $1600 additional cost respectively. I would expect the improvement to be roughly linear with the CPU speed change, so +7% and +14%. But we'll have to wait for someone to do the benchmarks to be sure.
Being CPU limited is not a feature, but to fix it will take a rewrite of the chimera internals and we're still evaluating how best to do it.
Greg Couch UCSF Computer Graphics Lab
On Tue, 4 Mar 2008, Tom Goddard wrote:
Here's a comparison of Chimera graphics benchmarks for the current standard PowerMac graphics versus the top-of-the-line graphics:
Radeon HD 2600 - no additional cost Quadro FX 5600 - $2850 additional cost
Surfaces and meshes: 1.8x faster
Volume solid style: size 443**3 vs 325**3. Quadro system was limited 32-bit main memory address space.
Molecule: Neglible difference for 34000 atom model in wire, stick, ball and stick, ribbon, sphere styles.
The Quadro card has 1.5 Gbytes of memory and will probably have significantly higher performance on solid style volume rendering if the Chimera volume display code is optimized. Probably adding more main memory will not help because the limitation is the 32-bit address space (a limit of Mac OS graphical applications).
The Quadro card did not correctly display volume data in solid style with 3d textures (solid rendering 2d texture option turned off) -- displayed a chessboard pattern. Did not test 3d textures on Radeon card.
Tom
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Hi Jeff, You are right, Leopard (Mac OS 10.5) allows for 64-bit graphical applications. I was not aware of this. We have not made a 64-bit Chimera version for the Mac and it could require significant work because 30 third-party packages Chimera uses will all have to build successfully in 64-bit mode. The Chimera developers have not yet discussed a time-line for achieving this. Tom
Tom, regarding 64-bit builds of various third-party packages, is there a way some of us Leopard users could help test / figure out if successful builds would be feasible? perhaps some of us who are knowledgeable with that kind of scut-work would be willing to help with that tedium (?) -Jeff (Triffo) Tom Goddard wrote:
Hi Jeff,
You are right, Leopard (Mac OS 10.5) allows for 64-bit graphical applications. I was not aware of this. We have not made a 64-bit Chimera version for the Mac and it could require significant work because 30 third-party packages Chimera uses will all have to build successfully in 64-bit mode. The Chimera developers have not yet discussed a time-line for achieving this.
Tom
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We have 64-bit builds on other platforms (e.g., Linux), so we know it's feasible. It's more of a resource issue, i.e., who is going to spend the time to do it, and how are we going to package it? Should we just make the OS X distribution fatter, and if we do, will it still run on 10.3? Does 10.5 let you run the 32-bit version to save memory when bundled with the 64-bit binary? Do we need to make 64-bit PPC version too? - Greg On Tue, 4 Mar 2008, William Jeffrey Triffo wrote:
Tom,
regarding 64-bit builds of various third-party packages, is there a way some of us Leopard users could help test / figure out if successful builds would be feasible? perhaps some of us who are knowledgeable with that kind of scut-work would be willing to help with that tedium (?)
-Jeff (Triffo)
Tom Goddard wrote:
Hi Jeff,
You are right, Leopard (Mac OS 10.5) allows for 64-bit graphical applications. I was not aware of this. We have not made a 64-bit Chimera version for the Mac and it could require significant work because 30 third-party packages Chimera uses will all have to build successfully in 64-bit mode. The Chimera developers have not yet discussed a time-line for achieving this.
Tom
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participants (4)
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Greg Couch -
Jeff Speir -
Tom Goddard -
William Jeffrey Triffo