Celestia Forums

Hi,

I have a GeForce4 MX with 64M DDR and I would like to know what kind of texture I can use (2k,4k,8k,etc).

When I go to "Help->Open GL Info" there is:

Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Renderer: GeForce4 MX 440/AGP
Version: 1.4.0
Max simultaneous textures: 2
Max texture size: 2048 <- Is this the maximum ?! It appears ridiculous regarding of my graphic card :/

I'm using Celestia 1.3.0 on a P2 333MHz with 380 of RAM on WIN98SE

Thanks.

I've never been sure what Max Texture Size affects exactly, because even my Geforce 2 can handle 16k easily. So you should be fine with 64Mb of video memory.

Sum0 can you explain me how you handle that kind of textures? i have also a GeForce 2.

i know that jpg's and png's i can only use 2k. but dds's i can 4k.
how can you handle 16k????
please explain me

Hi all

Dak, a 8k "DDS" texture should work on your machine of cource not very fast and a 16k DDS DXT1 works slow. Celestia use a special procedure to divide large maps into parts that can the grafic cards handle. The texture size in Open GL Info is only interesting for the cloud texture and for objects which uses a 3DS model (some moons and astroids). But do not try to install bump maps and specular maps with a GF2 MX.

ElPelado, have you now upgrated your RAM? If your computer has now 256MB or more then 8K DDS textures should work and 16K too but slow.

mi video card has 64MB
and the computer ram is only 128Mb
so i cant see 7k textures?

16k textures worked when I had 128Mb of system RAM, although they take a while to load. Try Earth with just the 16k texture (no bump maps, cloud maps, or specular maps, and a lo-res Moon texture) and test it. Then add the other textures and see if it works then.

I have a Geforce 4 MX 440 SE,256 MB RAM and Athlon xp 1800.I can handle only 4 k textures in jpg and png formats.For example,Jupiter is 2k and the frame rate is high.Io is 4k,but has only bumpmap working,and the fps is around 35-45 fps.But Earth is 4k,with textures 4k of clouds,bumpmap,specular and night aurora and in some moments,the fps goes below 10 fps.It?s the same with the Moon.I would like to know if 4k jpg or png is equivalent to 8k dds

Dak, a 8k "DDS" texture should work on your machine of cource not very fast and a 16k DDS DXT1 works slow. Celestia use a special procedure to divide large maps into parts that can the grafic cards handle. The texture size in Open GL Info is only interesting for the cloud texture and for objects which uses a 3DS model (some moons and astroids). But do not try to install bump maps and specular maps with a GF2 MX.

ElPelado, have you now upgrated your RAM? If your computer has now 256MB or more then 8K DDS textures should work and 16K too but slow.[/quote]

Hi everyone,
I too have a Geforce2 MX-400, it will handle some 8k dds like NewEarth8kdds,(43mbs), with NewEarth4k bumpmap, lightsaurora4kdds, earthclouds dds,earthspec dds, and earthnight.dds all going as well,not to mention the moon... but we go into coffee grinder mode with a moon 8k dds or a mars 8kdds.I have a recent nvidia driver, detonator45.23. One of the settings -Direct3d- is an extra memory thing( for PCI mode) which I set to 100mb, I dont know if it uses this or not.Is there perhaps some difference in the dds file quality?I had such a hassle trying to get the mars 8k to work I didnt bother trying another big one for a while so was surprised to find all the earth stuff worked. There is a handy dds thumbnail viewer for downloading on the NVidia site,I couldnt get any sort of preview of dds files using the windows picture viewer. To save solarssc editing I have Celestia folder"extras"with new folder"addons",then "Earth/Sol" folder then an "alt surface" EarthExtraHigh ssc with all the dds files specified,and a "textures"folder with a"hires" folder with the dds files in.This all comes in the right click menu and is easier to keep track of if you like to change things around or have more than the default set of 3 textures to display.
regards ziggy. *-]

ziggy,

I suspect your "coffee grinder mode" is what's often described as "the system is paging itself to death." If so, then this can be solved by adding more main memory to the computer itself. The extra memory usage may be related to the additional memory needed for their non-DDS bumpmaps, which both the moon and Mars normally have.

DDS files are used directly by the graphics hardware. As a result, they're faster to load than JPG and PNG files, which have to be expanded and translated. Whether or not they look better depends on how they were created (sorry: vague answer because I don't know the details).

Direct-3D settings are irrelevant for Celestia (unless you're trying to run a DirectX application at the same time). Celestia uses OpenGL.

Hi Selden, Thanks again for your interest, I have 512mb of ram and my pagefile is set at a fixed 768mb, (I understood that this meant it didnt or
couldnt fragment.) I've installed a program called maxmem which reclaims unreleased memory (only when you tell it.) Sometimes for eg microsofts "picture it" seems to keep hold of more than it needs to run. Maxmem has a system tray graph indicator like task manager; this shows the entire memory usage going into the red when the computer is doing the grinding thing, do you think I have a problem with my set up? I dont usually have any difficulty when working on jpegs, using quite a few effects and so on, all without consolidating, this must use a fair bit of memory, no? It only seems to struggle with some of the dds files,eg Redmars8k.Would it be worth missing out the bumpmaps if they are hogging the ram? I hope you did'nt mean it literally when you say "paging to death"... my poor computer...at least the fans get a good work-out. Please forgive my ignorance about the nature of direct3d and gl ....so much to learn, everything about computing seems to involve an exponentially increasing number of acronyms, anyway your advice and opinion valued as always
regards ziggy *-]

ziggy,

I'm pretty sure that "in the red zone" means "not enough physical memory" so the system has to use virtual memory.

( In order to make room for whatever is needed right now, it has to write older stuff out to the paging file. Then the system finds the program needs to access something that's been paged out. So it has to move something else out to the paging file to make room for that, etc. The running program has to be stopped to wait until the data it needs gets read back in from disk, slowing things badly.)

"Paging to death" usually just means that the system is running unbearbly slowly because everytime it tries to do something, whatever it needs is out on disk: it's running programs that just don't fit in main memory. Of course, disks do have a finite lifetime. The harder they have to work the sooner they'll fail.

FWIW, my system only has 256MB, so I normally use 2K images and only occasionally 4K. You'll have to decide which files to use depending on what you like to look at. Switching to the new "virtual texture maps" should help a lot. I've been doing deep-space things recently, so I haven't done that yet myself.