Celestia Forums

Will there be more support for ATI Radeon cards in Celestia 1.3.1? Radeons are getting vry very popular and it would be a shame for Celestia to stay pretty much nVidia only app and not show some very nice visual effects for Radeon users.

Most of the problems are bugs in the current Radeon device drivers for their lower-end cards. The 9500 and up work fine. Chris has posted this several times. Let ATI know you have problems.

Well I'm talking more about bump mapping and pixel/vertex shader support for Radeons and other things that enhance the visual experiance in Celestia.

I know that the Saturn bug and probably other bugs are a problem with their drivers. Maybe Chris or some other developer could contact ATI and I guess they would listen to him more then they are listening to us. I filed the bug severeal times but they still have no fix. So maybe Chris can do something as he also knows much better what is going on inside Celestia that drivers fail to draw correctly.

Chris probably should be the one answering, but what the heck...

My understanding is that bumpmaps and specular reflections work fine for ATI cards that support OpenGL v1.4 correctly i.e. Radeon 9500 and better. The only feature that I'm aware of that currently is supported only on Nvidia cards is atmospheric haze.

One problem is that none of the current Celestia development crew has any of the ATI cards. Chris is the one who does the OpenGL coding, but he can't write proprietary ATI code when he doesn't have a card to test it on. I seem to recall that he's posted that he intends to implement new graphics features as much as possible using the OpenGL V1.4 ARB_* routines rather than proprietary features. This is both so that Celestia will be as portable as possible and so he doesn't have to write several different versions of the same routines.

Remember Celestia is a personal labor of love for its developers. It gets no direct support from any graphics hardware or software vendor.