PyMOL Users: If you are lucky enough to own a fancy new OpenGL graphics card that supports shaders, there is some fancy new OpenGL code in PyMOL that I'd like you to test (Win & Mac).
PyMOL now has "sphere modes" that are memory-efficient, can provide much greater image quality for interactive CPK representations, and are ideal for visualizing large systems (0.5-3.0 million atoms). Sphere mode 5 is shader-based. Before shaders: <http://delsci.com/img/no_shader.jpg> After shaders: <http://delsci.com/img/shader.jpg> Here is what 2.5 million atoms looks like in PyMOL using this new sphere mode: <http://delsci.com/img/twofive.jpg> Note that these are all real time OpenGL images -- no ray tracing involved. Pretty amazing stuff for just ~50 instructions of hand-coded SIMD assembly language! To use: set sphere_mode, 5 as spheres or launch with "-O 5" options. Windows & Mac builds of 0.99beta07 at <http://delsci.com/beta> Note that if you don't have shader support on your graphics card, PyMOL will fall back onto sphere_mode, 4 -- sphere imposters -- which can meet or even beat shaders when zoomed out, but aren't useful up close. The remaining sphere modes: 3, 2, & 1 are simply reduced-complexity point modes useful for amping up the frame rate on slow systems. NOTE: This build contains a lot of "raw" code (less that 48 hours old), so do expect problems! Cheers, Warren -- Warren L. DeLano, Ph.D. Principal Scientist . DeLano Scientific LLC . 400 Oyster Point Blvd., Suite 213 . South San Francisco, CA 94080 USA . Biz:(650)-872-0942 Tech:(650)-872-0834 . Fax:(650)-872-0273 Cell:(650)-346-1154 . mailto:war...@delsci.com
