Celestia Forums

Hi Celestia lovers. OK, I'm tossing in my AGI Rage Pro video card and asking my family for a new video card that will allow me to view Celestia in its full specular, bump-mapped dds file glory. I know a lot of you use the G Force cards. Since I'm a novice at this, PLEASE - some advice. What video card should I get that will really showcase Celestia and be a dynamite video game card as well? Since my daughters will be buying this for me, price is somewhat of an issue. I have an HP Pentium IV 1.6 GB processor and 256 MG of RAM.

Thanks in advance for any advice you can give me.

GeForce 4 Ti 4400 or higher no less than 128 megs of VRAM....Get a MSI or visionTek brand...Also up your ram to 512 megs to see celestia in all its 'fast' glory

Unfortunately, "somewhat of an issue" means different things to different people.

Only the GeForce 4 Ti and GeForce3 Ti cards will show ring shadows.

$400: Nvidia GeForce4 Ti 4600 128MB
$200: Nvidia GeForce4 Ti 4200 128MB
$100: Nvidia GeForce3 Ti 200 64MB
$50: MX series --[only slightly] better than your ATI card. [I bow to Chris' superior knowledge in this regard ]

By shopping around, each can be found for less than what I've indicated.
The cards are made by several different companies. Nvidia only makes the chips and "reference" board design.

The "Ti" qualifier is important. Avoid the GeForce4 MX cards. They actually use GeForce2 chip designs and lack the necessary features.

I hope this helps.

Rassilon's recommendation is good, though if you're looking to spend a bit less, I'd recommend a GeForce 4 Ti 4200. The 64 megabyte version sells for as low as $110 online; the 128 meg cards are still around $140. Below that, it's a tough call between the GeForce3 Ti 200 with 64 megs and the GeForce4 MX 440 with 128 megs. Both are around $75; the GeForce4 MX 440 is missing a few features that the GeForce3 has, but the extra memory is very nice to have when using large textures. Be very careful about the names--the GeForce4 MX is a different chip than the GeForce4 Ti. Favor the GeForce4 Ti and GeForce3 over the MX.

You can get a decent graphics card for even less money . . . A GeForce4 MX 440 with 64 megs is only $50, and will give you a vastly better experience with Celestia than the ATI Rage Pro. The ATI Radeons are good cards too, and are available in a similar range of prices as NVIDIA GeForces; however, there currently not as well supported in Celestia.

Btw, a great place to do price comparisons is http://www.pricewatch.com.

--Chris

Wow. You guys are really great. Thanks for such a quick reply. I will take everyone's advice and pass these recommendations on to my daughters. The prices look fine. CHRISTMAS AND CELESTIA BUMP MAPS/SPECULAR LIGHTS, HERE I COME!!!

I'm grateful.

Warmest Regards,

Frank Gregorio

I would wach out for the MSI brand cards. I have seen several and they are not using NVidia's recomended cooling solution. Another really good brand is PNY and eVGA. The eVGA's cooling solutions are the best on the market. Thay are using heatpipe technology and NVidia'a recomended cooling solution as well as cooling for the memory on the back side of the card. JUst a few most choices to make.

Um...........Can I have one too?

chris wrote:Btw, a great place to do price comparisons is http://www.pricewatch.com.

--Chris

Yeah thats where I found my card...Great place cept watch those singapore companies...

I have been thinking: should not there be any GeForce 5 by now?

No no no. Not GeForce 5 its GeForce FX aka NV30.
If you can wait till february for a late x-mas present you could get one of those instead.

Rassilon wrote:GeForce 4 Ti 4400 or higher no less than 128 megs of VRAM....Get a MSI or visionTek brand...Also up your ram to 512 megs to see celestia in all its 'fast' glory

Rassilon, actually we have a NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 with 128 megs DDR on an Athlon 1.33 with 640 megs RAM at 133 MHz.
You say "no less than 128 megs of VRAM", so I have checked NVIDIA, VisionTek and MSI, but I have found only the new GeForce FX GPU.
Is this the monster that will power the future releases of CELESTIA?
How many megs will be able to use?
Thank you for your answer, I'm VERY iterested on the matter because we obtained a litlle money grant that we'll use for a new PC with the most powerful graphic card on the market, that we'll use in our Observatory for our Astronomy programs for students, that we are doing using CELESTIA.
By
Andrea
157 Frasso Sabino Observatory

If you don't mind waiting 2-3 more months, get the GeForce FX Ultra 5800. 500 dollars for a card much more powerful than any card out now, 256 mb of video RAM(no joke), 500/1000 MHz clock speeds.

Yup, this monster will handle anything you throw at it quite nicely

ANDREA wrote:

Rassilon wrote:GeForce 4 Ti 4400 or higher no less than 128 megs of VRAM....Get a MSI or visionTek brand...Also up your ram to 512 megs to see celestia in all its 'fast' glory

Rassilon, actually we have a NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 with 128 megs DDR on an Athlon 1.33 with 640 megs RAM at 133 MHz.
You say "no less than 128 megs of VRAM", so I have checked NVIDIA, VisionTek and MSI, but I have found only the new GeForce FX GPU.
Is this the monster that will power the future releases of CELESTIA?
How many megs will be able to use?
Thank you for your answer, I'm VERY iterested on the matter because we obtained a litlle money grant that we'll use for a new PC with the most powerful graphic card on the market, that we'll use in our Observatory for our Astronomy programs for students, that we are doing using CELESTIA.
By
Andrea
157 Frasso Sabino Observatory

Oh I was basically saying that if you want the best performance I would go with a card with 128 megs of video RAM...If you can afford the higher end cards as Donald stated there is a newer GeForce out that could be your best option though from my own experience I have not tried it yet...

Your current setup is more than enough to run Celestia...but in the days or years to come this can change...More features...more rendering requires more memory...to run Celestia the fastest and the smoothest on a super hi resolution monitor( I mean HI people, 4k resolution...HDTV size maybe) I would recommend a dual P4 2.2 gig processor with 1 gig of DDR ram maybe 256 megs of video RAM...although yet again I have not the experience with systems such as these running Celestia...Im not 100% sure Celestia will make use of the dual processing feature though I would very much like to know if its possible as some day i plan to build a super computer dedicated solely to my graphics rendering...And of course Celestia will play a big part in that since its about the only thing I create for right now....what else is there really?

Ras',

I just thought I should point out that HDTV really isn't all that high-res. At most it's 1920x1080. Currently available computer grahics cards can do better than that.

p.s.
No, Celestia doesn't (yet) take advantage of multiprocessor systems. Which is both good and bad. Since it only saturates one CPU, system interactive response is still very good. If it were modified to be multithreaded, though, Celestia's framerates could improve significantly on multiprocessor systems at the cost of being only very slightly slower on single CPU systems.

The GeForce4 Ti 4600 is the best card for Celestia right now; all of them have 128Mb of memory.

The GeForceFX will be even better for Celestia, but they're not available yet Celestia will take advantage of the new GeForceFX features (mainly the improved pixel shaders) to render some effects that aren't possible on a GeForce4. I'll soon post some screenshots generated with the GeForceFX emulation driver . . .

--Chris

chris wrote:The GeForce4 Ti 4600 is the best card for Celestia right now; all of them have 128Mb of memory.
The GeForceFX will be even better for Celestia, but they're not available yet Celestia will take advantage of the new GeForceFX features (mainly the improved pixel shaders) to render some effects that aren't possible on a GeForce4. I'll soon post some screenshots generated with the GeForceFX emulation driver . . .
--Chris

This is the address for GeForce FX
http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?PAGE=geforcefx

and here the address of the new (very interesting in my opinion) Matrox Parhelia 256 Mb
http://www.matrox.com/mga/media_center/ ... /256mb.cfm

May be this will be the next future (perhaps on February).
Do you think you'll have the possibility to generate some screenshot with the Parhelia too?
Thank you

Andrea