Dear pymol users, in your experience, how does the graphical performance of pymol (or any other graphical program) on a PC running under Linux with a good stereo-capable graphics card (Nvidia Quadro, ATI FireGL) compare to a stereo-capable SGI workstation (O2, Octane, Fuel, Onyx)? I've got an old Pentium III PC with 450 MHz and a (non-stereo) Nvidia GeForce2 MX440 graphics card side-by-side with an SGI O2 with a R12000 processor: a simple pymol (0.86) movie of a protein sketch at 800x800 resolution and maximum display quality requires on the SGI 3 minutes for 180 frames, i.e. 1 frame/sec, whereas the same movie requires on the PC 20 seconds, i.e. 9 frames/sec. I wonder how this can be and would like to hear about your experiences. I've compiled pymol from the source file with the mips pro compiler from SGI. Results were comparable with the previous pymol version for which I've installed directly the binaries. Thus, I don't think that the speed difference is due to a compiler problem on the SGI. I've got another graphics program for protein modelling, Moloc, that runs on both platforms. There, I've observed similar subjective speed differences in favour to the PC. But I couldn't measure any benchmarks.
Best regards, Dirk Kostrewa. -- **************************************** Dirk Kostrewa Paul Scherrer Institut Life Sciences, OSRA/007 CH-5232 Villigen PSI, Switzerland E-mail: dirk.kostr...@psi.ch Phone: +41-56-310-4722 Fax: +41-56-310-4556 WWW: http://www.sb.psi.ch ****************************************
