What Video Card Are You Using?

General discussion about Celestia that doesn't fit into other forums.
chris
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Post #41by chris » 03.12.2002, 02:56

selden wrote:Ras',

Some games manage to have large enough budgets and staff to write the code necessary to use each of the competing cards optimally. Unfortunately, Chris is just one person: he doesn't have the time to write all the code needed to compensate for the differences. I can't blane him for concentrating on the hardware he knows best.

I'm not the only one working on Celestia :)

Anyhow, more of Celestia's graphical features will be viewable on other cards soon . . . I recently checked in some code to begin the migration to use the ARB standardized vertex program extension. But I also love to play with the features of new graphics cards and the GeForceFX can do some amazing things . . . I do try and strike a balance between implementing features that a wide audience can enjoy, and more fun, experimental stuff that only works on the latest hardware.

--Chris

Troy
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Post #42by Troy » 03.12.2002, 07:10

NVidia TNT2 32meg

I also have a GeForce2 32... PCI!!! :? It's useless if I have any desire to play audio.. even browsing the web with it causes choppy music playback. I've traced it back to NVidia's drivers.
Troy Corbin Jr.
Member: Triton Tourism Board
http://knights.sourceforge.net

Topic author
Don. Edwards
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Post #43by Don. Edwards » 03.12.2002, 10:37

Well heres an adendum to what card I use.
I just got a GeForce4 TI 4600. And yes I can see a diference just uping from the Ti4200 with 64mb of VRAM. I am seeing slightly faster loads and now I can play with those realy big textures.
I am officially a retired member.
I might answer a PM or a post if its relevant to something.

Ah, never say never!!
Past texture releases, Hmm let me think about it

Thanks for your understanding.

SteelyKen

Post #44by SteelyKen » 09.12.2002, 09:09

I brought up the problem with nVidia-specific coding here about 7 months ago and asked when we ATI users could also fully enjoy this fantastic problem. I am very disappointed to see that we still cannot access all of the features that our cards are fully capable of using.
Chris, you say you like to play with new features on the latest hardware, but I see no support for the most advanced card available - the Radeon 9700 Pro. This card has been readily available for over 3 months and is selling extremely well. In fact, ATI has now available a whole line of DX9 compliant cards that are able to facilitate the features Celestia has now and in the future.
Vendor-specific coding is bad for the consumer. I appreciate the fact that Celestia is a freeware program and you can do as you see fit with it, but I sincerely hope that you will see the benefit of using open stardards as opposed to proprietary extensions. I think this would greatly benefit the Celestia community by bringing in many more people to enjoy the program you have put so much effort into.

Topic author
Don. Edwards
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Post #45by Don. Edwards » 09.12.2002, 10:51

To SteelyKen,
You have to remember that Chris works for NVidia so why do you think there was built in features for the NVidia cards from the get go. He had access to all the needed APIs. He didn't have access to the needed ATI versions of the APIs. Please give Chris a break on this. In time he will have these the features working but keep in mind its easier for him to implement than on the NVidia platform first.
As for the ATI Radeon being the most advanced card available. Well for now that might be the case but ATI's time in the sun is just about up. NVidia will pull ahead once again with the GeForce FX and we will start to see a Battle Royal between these video card monsters. Unless ATI can pull a rabbit out of there hat they are going to take up there former position as second fiddle again. What I would love to see is ATI buy out Matrox and meld the Perhelia technolgies in with the Radeon 9700 technologies. That might give them an final NVidia killer. But the likelyhood of this hapening are far and few between. Just my 2 cents. :)
I am officially a retired member.
I might answer a PM or a post if its relevant to something.

Ah, never say never!!
Past texture releases, Hmm let me think about it

Thanks for your understanding.

chris
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Post #46by chris » 09.12.2002, 19:16

Don. Edwards wrote:To SteelyKen,
You have to remember that Chris works for NVidia so why do you think there was built in features for the NVidia cards from the get go. He had access to all the needed APIs. He didn't have access to the needed ATI versions of the APIs. Please give Chris a break on this. In time he will have these the features working but keep in mind its easier for him to implement than on the NVidia platform first.

It's not that I work for NVIDIA so much as that's the hardware that I have in my computers at home. I don't own any ATI hardware, so it's difficult for me to write code using ATI's GL extensions. And standard, non vendor specific vertex and pixel shader extensions were only very recently approved by the OpenGL Architecture Review Board. So, I'm getting to it :>

--Chris

Solneman

Post #47by Solneman » 12.12.2002, 21:01

Had a Matrox G400, Radeon DDR, again G400 (because of the Radeon's loud fan: WROOOOOM), Radeon 7000 (without fan but poor performance) and am happy with my new silent Sapphire Radeon 9000 (without Pro and without fan). What a card - what a price!!! 8)

alanh

My card

Post #48by alanh » 13.12.2002, 16:04

nVidia Geforce4Go 440 64 MB (in a Dell Inspiron 8200).

Guest

my card from the PCI age

Post #49by Guest » 21.12.2002, 06:58

S3 Virge DX (pci) with the enormous amount of FOUR (4) MB of RAM. Really. I also have a 3D accelerator attached: Diamond Monster II with 12 MB of RAM --sigh!-- hardware in Greece is uncommon! Celestia might be the sole reason for my next hardware upgrade; I'm thinking of acquiring an Ati Radeon 9000 with 128 MB DDR, whitch brings me to the following subject (pls excuse my lack of forum-posting experience if I'm not addresing to the correct forum for my questions)-- :?: I read about a `2k' texure on another post; what is a `2k' texture? I also read about an upper limit on numbers that appear to be texture resolutions (16384x8192) do these numbers represent pixels?--is this a limit above which Celestia behaves abnormally due to the nature of the code or there is a hardware limitation? Or, better yet, what IS the limit of creating high-complexity photorealistic graphics, assuming you have state-of-the-art hardware? Can someone post a link to relevant documentation in an effort for me to stop occupying your valuable web space with my newcomer's questions? :roll:
Excuse the length of my post, but I'm very impressed by Celestia and I'm full of questions about it! A simple mechanism creating something that complex ... 8O It's a great conception! Pretty please, with sugar on top, keep maintaining it! :D :D

ArVas
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PS

Post #50by ArVas » 21.12.2002, 07:15

It's me with the S3Virge pci card again-- I just forgot to add my name in my previous post :oops: :lol:

Topic author
Don. Edwards
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Post #51by Don. Edwards » 21.12.2002, 09:10

Hi ArVas,
Simply put a 2k texture is 2048k in size. Such as 2048x1024. Of course a texture at 2048x1024 might not be just 2k in actual bit size. I now this sounds confusing and maybe we need to rectify how we dicribe textures.
As for your purchase of a new video card. I highly recomend you stay away from any ATI cards for the forseable future. They just can not give you all the benefits that an NVidia based card can give you. Chris only has NVidia cards to work with at this time so he has not been able to port across features such as bumpmapping and spectural lighting effects to the ATI card platform. These features may not sound like much but if you saw them in action you would soon see the advantange of the GeForce family of cards over the Radeon family. Don't get me wrong, ATI's cards are great for games and just about any other 3D app you can throw at them but they plain suck for use with Celestia. Until Chris can come up with the capital to buy ATI cards I strongly recomend you go with NVidia.
I am officially a retired member.
I might answer a PM or a post if its relevant to something.

Ah, never say never!!
Past texture releases, Hmm let me think about it

Thanks for your understanding.

bh
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Post #52by bh » 22.12.2002, 01:10

Don...

Not everyone can afford to upgrade, it's just not that simple. I have an Nvidia card but had to disable it due to various hardware conflicts. Mainly my old Targa 17" could only refresh at 60 Hz. The only dropout in performance was loosing spec and bump mapping. I can live with that.

Celestia is a great app.. and it's going to get better. Lets not be too hard on us AGP guys!

DavidR
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Post #53by DavidR » 22.12.2002, 02:00

NVIDIA, Geoforce II MX 32Mb :roll: He works fine...

I work too with laptops IBM Thinkpad 600x, Neomagic card (Celestia, low res) and Thinkpad T23, Super Savage (Celestia, normal res)

jll
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Post #54by jll » 22.12.2002, 16:04

GeForce 2 MX 400 64 Mb on Tower Alton 1800+ 256Mb
Nice with 4k dds textures

S3 Savage/MX 8Mb on Toshiba Tecra 8100 Pentium III 256 Mb
good with low res textures.

Guest

Post #55by Guest » 23.12.2002, 16:21

gigabyte radeon pro 128mb

Guest

Post #56by Guest » 23.12.2002, 16:24

(9000) :oops:

Stan
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What graphics card

Post #57by Stan » 24.12.2002, 01:21

Mine's a Radeon VE in this machine but I have a G-Force card of two-three years old (for which I'd need to go downstairs to get the finer details). Both work fine with Celestia except that i haven't managed a movie-save on the G-force (but that might be another problem of course).
John Stanley (Stan)

ArVas
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Post #58by ArVas » 24.12.2002, 02:50

I am lucky. A friend of mine gave me a riva TNT 2 (32MB) for a couple of weeks. :P The difference is enormous! I wonder how deep the rabbit hole goes :twisted:

phychi

Post #59by phychi » 20.01.2003, 19:32

So far I have only tested with a Radeon Mobility 9000 (on Dell Ispiron 8200). The software works great in 1280x1024x32bit with anti-aliasing on, but no pixel/vertex shader :cry:
I will definitly have a test on my desktop computer with Nvidia 4200 Ti to see how big the difference is.

Guest

Post #60by Guest » 21.01.2003, 17:52

ATI Radeon 9700 Pro.
Really hope Celestia will support ATI card in the future.
Thank you Chris for your program.


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