Celestia Forums

Does anyone run Celestia on a new iMac ? What fps are you getting ? What size can you run at ? Does bump mapping/specular rendering work ?

This might be a deciding factor in a purchace decision...

I'm running Celestia now on an obsolescent beige PowerMac G3 desktop with a PCI Mac Radeon graphics card. Before I installed the Radeon card, I could run Celestia, but only just barely; frame rates were very low. Now it runs fine, although I'm sure I'm getting far from top of the line performance. My guess is that the new iMac (G4 and AGP GeForce 2MX) would be an improvement over what I'm getting, but that's just a guess.

I have to admit the new iMac is very attractive, and I may end up with one myself. But I am a bit concerned about the fact that the graphics card is not user upgradeable, as consumer graphics technology is advancing so rapidly these days. If I hadn't been able to add a Radeon to my PowerMac G3, I would have been out of luck. I'd have had to buy a whole new Mac to replace my old beige clunker, such as a cool new iMac... But then, maybe that wouldn't be so bad after all!

Good luck with you buying decision...

- Hank

I'm running it on the new imac and get roughly between 5 and 20fps, depending on the environment I'm in, nothing to compare to my GeForce on the PC. Also the 8MB Video-RAM suck a lot. But it's ok to enjoy space in my opinion.

boertje wrote:I'm running it on the new imac and get roughly between 5 and 20fps, depending on the environment I'm in, nothing to compare to my GeForce on the PC. Also the 8MB Video-RAM suck a lot. But it's ok to enjoy space in my opinion.

But the new (flatscreen) iMacs have 32 MB of video-RAM on a GeForce 2 MX, a lot better than your configuration.

lol
yeah... right
all this damn i-mac i-book i-pod.... I own the latest IBOOK (G3-600, ati rage (128? dunno right know) with 8MB vram. So my results are comparable to what the older ibooks/imacs should get since apple didn't change the graphics-adapter in these models (CPU doesn't make too much difference I suppose ?). Of course the new imac should get a lot better framerate. I don't know about bump mapping and stuff since there are some issues with the osx-port.

Tends to average 20-40 fps at "fullscreen" on my iMac 800, depending on what's in view. Can't give exact figures since it's at home and I'm at work. (I can tell you though, that my work system -- dual G4/500, radeon 8500 -- gets about those same numbers for fullscreen on its 22" cinema display. A little lower once you turn on galaxy rendering.)