Re: [ccp4bb]: Benchmarks, stereo and more

[Timm Maier <tmaier@chemie.fu-berlin.de>]

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Hello Jeroen,
we have stereo running on a dual athlon MP 1600 with a radeon7500 ( OEM,
64MB ) graphics adapter card using the XIG driver. Initially, we had some
trouble with stereo stability ( crashes on resizing windows etc ), however
this was not specific for stereo applications or XIG driver, e.g. also
Tuxracer without a XIG driver crashed the computer. We had to change
several settings ( AGP speed etc. ). This problem was specific only for
one computer - it did not occur on any Pentium based Workstation ( using
Radeon 7500 or 8500 ). The "slight" instability of dual Athlon MP systems
on Tyan Tiger boards seems to be quite well known, at least I got reports
from people working in movie making and 3D Modelling about it. One other
issue is a bug in the memory handling ( L1/L2 cache prefetching, I guess
it was ) of some Athlon CPU together with quite recent Linux kernels, this
one leads to AGP problems only at high duty. A fix is given on the AMD
webpages ( don't know the location by heart, it was on the problems pages
asssociated with AGP problems ).

However - all problems I ever noticed after corecct installation were
stability problems on this one computer, I have never seen this weird "
half side-by-side half stereo-in-a-window" feature. If you are sure that
everything is installed correctly - are you sure that the graphics adapter
card is o.k. ? ( In 10 purchased new computers we encountered three
damaged graphics cards ! ). If you need more detailed information on
individual settings etc. please do not hesitate to contact us again !

Bye and best regards

Timm

P.S. I forgot to mention that even our problems machine runs now without
problems ( no reports from other users, and I have been using it up to
three days in stereo without any crash ).
____________________________________________________________________________

                 TIMM MAIER
                           Proteinkristallographie
                           Institut fuer Kristallographie
                           Takustr.6
                           14195 Berlin

                           tmaier@chemie.fu-berlin.de
____________________________________________________________________________

On Mon, 6 Jan 2003, Jeroen Mesters wrote:

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> ***          CCP4 home page http://www.ccp4.ac.uk         ***
>
> Dear all,
>
> For more benchmarks you can also have a look at
> http://wserv1.dl.ac.uk/CFS/benchmarks/compchem.html
>
> Does anyone besides Harry Greenblat have experience with stereo under linux
> for nvidia cards (there was a problem with the glasses if I remember correctly)?
>
> Stereo works only partly on our dual athlon xp - Ati 8500 (128mb): one side of
> the stereo picture contains both left and right eye picture.... www.xig.com did not
> answer any of my questions but the problem did not occur with a Matrox G450.
> So much for their excellent support.
>
> Who has stereo running properly on a dual processor linux machine? Please inform me about
> your configuration: processor, chip set and graphics card!
>
> Thanks, Jeroen.
> --
> Jeroen Raymundus Mesters, Ph.D.                           Alias Geronimo
> Dept. of Structural Biology and Crystallography,  Institute of Molecular
> Biotechnology, P.O.Box 100 813, D-07708 Jena, Germany.
> Tel: +49-3641-656063, Fax: +49-3641-656062, E-mail: jmesters@imb-jena.de
> http://www.imb-jena.de/www_sbx/home.html
> --
> If you can look into the seeds of time and say
> which grain will grow and which will not - speak then to me    (Macbeth)
> --
>