memory(?)-problem

General discussion about Celestia that doesn't fit into other forums.
Topic author
jockl
Posts: 2
Joined: 11.11.2005
With us: 19 years
Location: Germany

memory(?)-problem

Post #1by jockl » 11.11.2005, 11:21

Hi,

I tried to run Celestia 1.3.2 on my new notebook. It has a ATI XM200 graphics card and 512MB RAM. I know that there are problems with Celestia and ATI cards, but the programm runs smoothly in the beginning. However, after a while the swapfile on my harddisk gets overloaded, and Celestia breaks down. I can exit it, and after a while everything is back to normal.

Is this a problem of my graphics card? As I said, the program runs good for the first 20 minutes or so. Or do I need to get more RAM? My notebook has 256MB more than my desktop PC, where no problems ever appeared. I increased the swap file space, but there seems to be no difference.

Hope anyone can help me with this.

Thanks,

Jan

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selden
Developer
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With us: 22 years 2 months
Location: NY, USA

Post #2by selden » 11.11.2005, 12:22

ATI's low end laptop graphics chips have no on-board graphics memory. Instead they use the system's main memory.

Celestia doesn't try to reclaim the graphics memory used by models and textures. As you visit more different objects, its graphics memory use will increase.

Assuming you're running XP, you might try running the Task Manager and watching the page file usage graph on its Performance page. It'll probably show increased use every time you change viewpoints in Celestia.
Selden

Topic author
jockl
Posts: 2
Joined: 11.11.2005
With us: 19 years
Location: Germany

Post #3by jockl » 11.11.2005, 13:14

Hi,

Assuming you're running XP, you might try running the Task Manager and watching the page file usage graph on its Performance page. It'll probably show increased use every time you change viewpoints in Celestia.


This is true. So you would say that running Celestia on shared-memory-graphics computers is not possible?

Regards,

Jan

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selden
Developer
Posts: 10192
Joined: 04.09.2002
With us: 22 years 2 months
Location: NY, USA

Post #4by selden » 11.11.2005, 14:17

I would say rather that such systems need much more main memory (RAM) than you would expect.
Selden


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