Dear developers,
We recently installed OVITO on an Ubuntu 20.04 machine to analyse LAMMPS trajectory.
However to my surprise, atoms are drawn as ugly half spheres after the camera is moved or the image simply clicked on. The box is also drawn in a weird way. I’ll attach an example image, because this is carried on in rendered image.
I have never encountered this bug before. I suspect a problem with OpenGL installation but couldn’t figure it out. I’ve upgraded the distribution packages to the latest release possible, but the problem persists.
Here is a copy of the system info from the ovito software (using the latest version didn’t fix the problem either):
======= System info =======
Current date: Wed May 22 16:36:51 2024
Application: OVITO Basic 3.10.6
Operating system: (-1.-1)
uname output: 5.15.0-107-generic #117~20.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Tue Apr 30 10:35:57 UTC 2024 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
LSB output: Ubuntu Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS 20.04
Processor architecture: x86_64
Qt version: 6.5.3 (x86_64)
Command line: /home/jeanbaptiste/Programmes/OVITO/ovito-basic-3.10.6-x86_64/bin/ovito data.NVT.lmp
Python file path: /home/jeanbaptiste/Programmes/OVITO/ovito-basic-3.10.6-x86_64/lib/ovito/plugins/python
======= OpenGL info =======
Vendor: AMD
Renderer: AMD Radeon Pro W6600 (navi23, LLVM 14.0.5, DRM 3.42, 5.15.0-107-generic)
Version number: 4.6
Version string: 4.6 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 22.2.0-devel (git-e8fc5cc 2022-06-22 focal-oibaf-ppa)
Profile: compatibility
Swap behavior: other
Depth buffer size: 24
Stencil buffer size: 8
Shading language: 4.60
Deprecated functions: yes
Geometry shader support: yes
Alpha: 0
Any insight is welcome.
This must be a bug in the OpenGL driver on your system. This kind of display artifact must be rare (we haven’t received similar reports in the recent past) and I’m afraid we don’t know a solution or workaround at the moment.
I just pulled up a bug report we received via email for OVITO 2.6.1 in 2016. A similar glitch in the particle display - but for a much older Mesa version and different graphics hardware:
Application: Ovito 2.6.1
OS: Linux
LSB output: Arch "Arch Linux" rolling
Architecture: 64 bit
Qt version: 5.4.1
======= OpenGL info =======
Version: 3.3
Profile: core
Vendor: Intel Open Source Technology Center
Renderer: Mesa DRI Intel(R) Sandybridge Mobile
Version string: 3.3 (Core Profile) Mesa 11.1.2
Shading language: 3.30
Geometry shaders supported: yes
What you can try is to select a different “rendering quality” mode in the particles visual element settings. OVITO will then use a different rendering technique, perhaps more compatible with your OpenGL graphics driver. Please let me know if you observe any improvement.
I am wondering why you have Mesa 22.2.0-devel installed. This development version is newer than Ubuntu 20.04, but it is not the latest release. Is there a reason why you are at this particular release?
Thanks for pointing the mismatch between mesa lib versions. I didn’t set up the computer and updates where quite chaotic in the past, so I took a thorough look through the libraries and also noticed that AMD GPU drivers were not installed correctly.
There are apparently some delay between libdrm and mesa updates which might cause problems for the installations of dependencies. This Stack Overflow post helped me in downgrading the libraries down to a working installation.
I am glad that you have found a solution.
