The largest complaints about Avogadro v1.x were about crashes and slow performance on large systems. To solve this, we needed to rewrite the code essentially from the ground up. Marcus Hanwell and others at Kitware contributed significantly to this effort.
The new architecture also makes it much easier to extend, whether for your own specific needs, or to connect with a wide variety of chemistry software.
- Improved stability using a new code architecture
- Dramatically improved rendering performance, up to millions of atoms
- Improved rendering quality, using modern GPU programming
- Volumetric rendering using Kitware's VTK
- Support for visualizing open-shell calculations, rendering alpha/beta orbitals and spin density
- Improve extensibility with embedded Python extensions
- Downloadable plugins for input generators, workflow commands, force fields, and import/export of files, contributed by Paul Boone
- Extensible charge and force field models
- Improved symmetry features, contributed by Marcus Johansson, including display of equivalent atoms, symmetry elements, and subgroups.
- Improved draw tool, including interactive feedback about bond lengths and automatic bond orders.
- Support for inter-application communication over RPC calls, including Molequeue and XtalOpt visualization.