Celestia Forums

I just bought a 128mb PNY GeForce card and Celestia is still sticking when it loads planet textures..Anybody know why???

Thanks Guys

What kind of disk and system do you have?

Loading textures takes longer on older, slower systems. It's a combination of slow disk (reading the file into memory), slow CPU (decompressing jpg or png images) and slow AGP bus (transferring images into the graphics card). Using DDS textures (used directly by the graphics hardware, so they don't need to be decompressed first) makes it go quite a bit faster, but the pause is still noticable.

Home system: noticable pauses
256MB 500MHz P3, 2xAGP, WinXP Pro sp1, fast/wide SCSI disks
128MB GF4 Ti4200, Detonator 43.45, OpenGL 1.4

Work system: no noticable pauses
512MB, 2.4GHz P4, 4xAGP, WinXP Pro sp1, U180 SCSI disks
128MB FX 5200, Detonator 44.03, OpenGL 1.4

selden wrote: It's a combination of slow disk (reading the file into memory), slow CPU (decompressing jpg or png images) and slow AGP bus (transferring images into the graphics card).

And small memory too!!

jamarsa wrote:And small memory too!!

Only if it has to page to disk. That usually doesn't happen with the textures included with Celestia if you have at least 128MB. On the other hand, 4K textures on a 256MB system can be rather slow, and don't even bother trying to use 8K or larger...

selden wrote:On the other hand, 4K textures on a 256MB system can be rather slow, and don't even bother trying to use 8K or larger...

But you don't stand with the default textures if you buy a 128Mb graphics card...

In my experience, memory is the biggest cause of system slowness (in M$ Windows, at least) and the most cheap to fix.

I've got a NVIDIA GeForce MX/MX 400 64 Mb Graphics card
and 384 Mb of Memory. I've got no Problems with Celestia Everything loads in seconds.Though that might be that I'm just using standard Textures. Memory is pretty cheap, you can get a 128 Mb chip for about $30 around here.

- Shadow

I figure the system specs to have to reduce the load time to nil or fairly close would be something along these lines...

Xeon processor 4 meg cache 2.5 ghz
RAMbus 800 mhz clock 2 gigs RAM
Make sure your using Ultra ATA 133 hard drives...
And find one of those workbench graphics cards that have 512 to 1024 megs of vram...Geforce preferrably...They of course run from 599 american dollars...