Who is using a Mac and what video card ?

[Cham]

Hello guys.

Who is using Celestia on a Mac, and what video card are you using ?

Please, can you tell some informations about your Celestia experience and problems, related to the video card ?

Thanks.

[dirkpitt]

I have a 17" PB 1.33Ghz with Mobility Radeon 9700 (64Mb). I've already posted a bug report in the Bugs forum, but briefly I get the Ring Shadows lockup, incorrect normal map display, incorrect moon shadowing by a planet, and other UI issues. I'm going to see if the latest OS X 10.3.6 developer seed and/or Celestia CVS version changes anything.

[Matt McIrvin]

I've got a 2002 Dual G4 Quicksilver with a Radeon 7500 (downgrade from the stock nVidia card being sold at the time), OS 10.3.5. I think it's a 32MB card. The video card's probably the weakest thing about the system.

Celestia generally runs fine, except that I can't see atmospheric haze, bump maps, or, for some reason, the shadow of a planet on its rings (though the shadow of the rings on the planet *does* appear). I don't think the first two are officially supported on this card.

Ever since the arrival of Quartz Extreme, I've had the "scrambled desktop textures on Earth at certain large display sizes" bug (which I think we all agree is probably a driver/Quartz Extreme interaction bug and nothing to do with Celestia), but it is relatively rare these days and easily fixed by resizing the window slightly.

[Cutia]

I'm using a Radeon 9800XT with 128Mb on a Dual 2.5 Ghz G5.

It doesn't seem to display as good as it should but I'm new to Celestia so I don't really know. Hopefully a future release will address issues.

[selden]

Cutia,

The rendering problems you see can't be investigated until you describe exactly what they are.

[Guest]

Celestia generally runs fine, except that I can't see atmospheric haze, bump maps, or, for some reason, the shadow of a planet on its rings (though the shadow of the rings on the planet *does* appear). I don't think the first two are officially supported on this card.

Ever since the arrival of Quartz Extreme, I've had the "scrambled desktop textures on Earth at certain large display sizes" bug (which I think we all agree is probably a driver/Quartz Extreme interaction bug and nothing to do with Celestia), but it is relatively rare these days and easily fixed by resizing the window slightly.

A few more observations:

- I get the famous "red/blue planet" bug when bump maps are turned on, and the usual fixes work. Presumably this is a driver bug. I've heard that bumpmaps aren't supported in Celestia with ATI cards, so can I then deduce that the problem is in the unaccelerated driver for software bumpmap support?

- DDS textures work beautifully in Celestia 1.3.2 on the Mac, and do not exhibit the Quartz Extreme scrambled texture bug on my system (really big ones do make the frame rate low when the whole planet is in view-- it's possible that they are defeating hardware acceleration entirely-- but I don't care that much). I highly recommend that anyone with an ATI Mac who is irritated by the scrambled texture bug try out some of the DDS textures on the Motherlode.

- The first time I ran Celestia 1.3.2 after downloading it, I actually saw a low-resolution, jaggy rendering of about half of the shadow of Saturn on its rings. It disappeared entirely shortly thereafter, and I've been unable to reproduce it since then.

[selden]

I've heard that bumpmaps aren't supported in Celestia with ATI cards, so can I then deduce that the problem is in the unaccelerated driver for software bumpmap support?

My understanding is that bumpmaps work fine in Celestia with most ATI cards under Windows when current ATI graphics drivers are used. In other words, most of the problems seem to be in the OpenGL drivers being provided for them under MacOS X and Linux

[Cham]

It's not just about the drivers. It's also about the OS X port of Celestia. I'm running an unoficial version of Celestia 1.3.2 on OS X 10.3.3 with an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, and Celestia works like a charm ! I can even use all the multiple stars systems with multiple shadows, which is supposed to be part of Celestia 1.4.0 !

[Marco]

I use a Radeon 9200 on an iBook G4 933 MHz with 640 MB RAM. OS X 10.3.6.

In Celestia 1.3.2-1:

Performance is generally quite good, but there are a few problems:

- Saturn doesn't cast shadows on rings and vice-versa unless I switch the rendering-method once through until I'm on openGL vertex again. Then the shadows suddenly appear.

- As soon as I go to the Moon (or Mars), Celestia freezes. About 10 seconds later, the whole system freezes and I have to turn my Mac off. This is probably because of the bumpmaps, when I switch them off in solarsys.ssc, the problem doesn't show up. The Normalmaps don't work neither. When I use the alternate surface VT earth-hs-32k.ssc "Earth 32k Normalmap+Nightlights+Spec", the system crashes. "Earth 32k Nightlights+Spec" is working well. In Celestia 1.3.1, the moon looked like a disco ball, but the system didn't crash.

- With many additional galaxies, they seem to twinkle, when I watch from a large distance. When zooming in, they appear, disappear and appear again...

Thanks for working on better versions of Celestia for Mac! Celestia is fantastic! I casually take a few friends on a celestia tour in our home cinema and there we really feel like intercelestial beings flying around in big scales of time and space...

Marco, Switzerland

[Cutia]

Sorry, it was the unusual looking colours that I was confused about when using some texture maps. But upon having loaded in DDS textures it seems as if it is now rendering correctly.

Apple are releasing a new update this week that includes updated ATI graphics card drivers, so it will be interesting to see if any of the reported problems are corrected.

[Adreitz]

I've got a Quicksilver 867 with a Radeon 8500 running 10.3.7. My only problems are the normal/bump map problem and that some (but not all) 4k or larger textures (but not VTs) refuse to load.

From discussion in the dev forum, the bump mapping problem seems to be caused by Celestia using an incorrect rendering path for the bump maps. Check out http://www.giofx.net/osx/index.htm for an example program that correctly uses bump and normal maps. I'd really appreciate if someone could get a new build of Celestia up that fixes this!!

Aaron