Celestia Forums

Hi,

Does anyone have a GeForce FX5200 with 128M DDR? Would like to
know what size cloud texture it can use (2k,4k,8k)?

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

Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Renderer: GeForce FX 5200/AGP
Version: 1.4.0
Max simultaneous textures: 16
Max texture size: 2048, 4096, 8192 <Which of these values show here?

I was going to buy one if it can do 4096 or 8192 clouds.
If it only does 2048 like the Geforce4 MX440, then what
Geforce card do you need to get for 8192 clouds?
If anyone has this or any card that can do 8192 clouds
please let me Know. Thanks Mark

I have a Gforce4 Ti 4600 128meg, 512meg main ram
and Celstia reports it can use a 4096 max texture, and 4 simaltaneous textures.

BUT!
I am currently using Don Edwards 16k Earth Texture, together with his 8k Spec map, and his 4k night map,
with Fridgers great 2k cloud map, and an 8k Normal map(bump map) too.
thats five textures, and I can see Jims 8k moon texture in the bacground too.

all these files are DDS textures, and run at a very smooth frame rate, and look fantastic.
No flickering or jumping at all.

So dont worry too much about the GL report
Just remember when using larger textures, try to use dds files as much as posible.

Don Edwards has made a nice 4k Cloud texture too
But I dont know of any 8k clouds maps yet

I think i remember reading that anything above 4k in cloud maps is pointless. for some reason, I don't remember why.

visit Dons Earth Central to get these great files
http://63.224.48.65/~impulse/Earth_Central/Earth_Central.html

Here are some shots of all five of these files working together

Removed due to me getting a bit far off the point

just for what it's worth, to answer the original question, here's the info for a 128MB FX5200 on a P4 system:

That "Max simultaneous textures" thing means nothing...
I can only display two, (apparently), but I was still able to show the moon passing in front of earth, as viewed from mars. And they were all big on the screen!


That's:
Mars texture (4k)
Mars Specmap (2k)
Mars Clouds (1k)

Moon texture (2k)

Earth Texture (8k)
Earth specmap (4k)
Earth NORMALmap (8k)
Earth Clouds (2k)
Earth Nightmap (8k)

That's nine, on something that thinks it can only display two. It wasn't really that jerky either!

Maximum simultaneous textures is not the upper limit on the number of textures displayed at one time (which is effectively infinite.) Rather, it's the number of textures that may be applied to a single triangle in one rendering pass. When more textures are available, some things that would have required two passes to render can be reduced to a single pass, thereby increasing performance.

Planet textures in Celestia are automatically split into tiles if they exceed the 3D hardware's maximum texture size. Since no existing hardware supports textures larger than 4096x4096, this splitting is a very important capability for all you monster texture junkies. Texture splitting only works for very specific texture coordinate mappings, so it's not possible to use textures larger than the OpenGL-reported maximum for 3DS models.

--Chris

just for what it's worth, to answer the original question, here's the info for a 128MB FX5200 on a P4 system:
Code:
Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Renderer: GeForce FX 5200/AGP/SSE2
Version: 1.4.0
Max simultaneous textures: 4
Max texture size: 4096 < This answers the? Thanks!
_________________
Selden

Thankyou Selden, Chris & everyone for your help.
I wish to make a 8192x8192 cloud texture for Earth & Mars
But from what I here the max is 4096x4096 even with a
Geforce FX5900 256 DDR? Chris will Texture spliting be
available for cloud maps in future releases?
Aslo Selden are you happy with the frame rate of the
FX5200 128ddr "non ultra" graphics card?

Thanks Mark

The frame rate seems fine. This is a card with a 128bit memory data path. Apparently the cards with a 64bit data path are somewhat slower. I posted some simplistic benchmarks in a previous thread: 30fps full screen, 11K km from the earth, ~45deg field of view, time running at 1000x, 1600X1200; 60fps windowed with the same distance and time parameters; 75 fps windowed but viewing the earth from ~30K km.

I did encounter what looked like a heating problem with the eVGA card I was using. (It could have been a faulty card, I suppose.) It only had passive cooling: a heatsink but no fan. The adjacent PCI slot was empty and the next slot had (has) a low profile scsi card, so there should have been reasonable cooling. After running for about 10-15 minutes either in 3D mode or with a video overlay from a Hauppauge video input card, however, the digital output started having sync problems. The analog outputs were fine, but I needed to use the digital output for the display so I could connect another system (RGB with sync on green) to the display's analog input.

The eVGA card was replaced with a slightly more expensive ($100 vs $80) equivalent from Asus (which we happened to have) that has a fan. It eliminated the sync problems.