Advice on a strange effect with Nvidia 9600 GT card

[fsgregs]

Hi everyone. I'd greatly appreciate your advice. I just installed a new PNY brand Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT video card with 512 MB of VRAM on my home PC. It has sped up the frame rates in Celestia 151, but I am getting a strange effect that I never got before. Surrounding all stars now is a black, dim, transparent square box. It seems to extend a bit farther out than the outer edge of the flare texture (about 3 -4 solar radii). It is transparent and you can see through it, but when looking through it, the stars behind it are about 30% dimmer. The box enlarges and shrinks as you move closer to or farther away from the star. I'd post a screenshot of it, but it is too dim to appear on a screen capture. I only notice it when the room lights are dim or absent. I suspect it has something to do with the flare texture. I do not get the box around planets or moons. I am running in OpenGL 2.0

I did not have this with my 7600 GT card, even with the same driver version. I have installed two different Nvidia driver versions (the newest and the one that came with the card), and the effect is present with both driver version.

Any thoughts anyone?

Thanks as always

Frank

[t00fri]

I am sure you installed the latest driver for your new card?

Fridger

[fsgregs]

Fridger:

Yes, I installed the latest driver posted on the Nvidia site just 2 weeks ago. I also tried a version from July. The effect is present with both. It also occurs in all render paths with Celestia 1.5.1 from Basic to OpenGL 2.0. Since it only occurs around stars, and since it seems to end about 20% beyond the edge of the outer flare texture boundary, I suspect it has something to do with the flare effect.

I checked out Celestia 1.4.1 and the effect does NOT occur.

I have NOW discovered that the effect only occurs when stars are set to Points. When i set them to Fuzzy points or scaled disks, there is no black box.

So, the points setting in 1.5.1 is the problem with this particular card.

I can live with it, since I can always keep the fuzzy points setting, but it might be useful to the developers to have this effect reported.

Frank