Celestia Forums

Thought I share this with ya all: some games have the strange behaviour of performing better at high(er) resolutions. Thought that this might be also the case with Celestia and indeed: at 1280x1024 it runs better then at 1024x768 .... and running in full screen also helps, way faster then windowed mode .... at least, this is how it works on my system:

Asus A7V266 mobo
AMD XP 1900+ CPU
1 Gb DDR RAM
Asus GeForce4 Ti4200 128 Mb graphics card with latest Detonator drivers from NVidia.
Windows XP Home SP1

Anyone else who also has better performance in higher resolutions?

1280x1024? 1024x768? I dont think that either should work with celestia, it usually hasd to be a power of two (1x2, 2x4, 4x8, 8x16, 16x32, 32x64, 64x128, 128x256, 256x512, 512x1024, 1024x2048, ect...). As for higher resolution, 1280x1024 is barely bigger than 1024x768, so, even if you did get these to work, the difference in performance should be barely noticible, and definately not the way you put it. Not to be rude or anything, but it may have just been a fluke.

billybob884 wrote:1280x1024? 1024x768? I dont think that either should work with celestia, it usually hasd to be a power of two (1x2, 2x4, 4x8, 8x16, 16x32, 32x64, 64x128, 128x256, 256x512, 512x1024, 1024x2048, ect...). As for higher resolution, 1280x1024 is barely bigger than 1024x768, so, even if you did get these to work, the difference in performance should be barely noticible, and definately not the way you put it. Not to be rude or anything, but it may have just been a fluke.

Ah ok ... I mean the screen resolution, the resolution of how the graphics card is displaying on the monitor .... not the size of the graphics used in Celestia.

billybob884 wrote:1280x1024? 1024x768? I dont think that either should work with celestia, it usually hasd to be a power of two (1x2, 2x4, 4x8, 8x16, 16x32, 32x64, 64x128, 128x256, 256x512, 512x1024, 1024x2048, ect...). As for higher resolution, 1280x1024 is barely bigger than 1024x768, so, even if you did get these to work, the difference in performance should be barely noticible, and definately not the way you put it. Not to be rude or anything, but it may have just been a fluke.

Sorry Billybob884, but I don't agree . I use Celestia on the Earth or Mars (both 16k!) with specmap, clouds, and galaxies ON, at more than 50 FPS at 1600x1200 16 bit resolution, and I have a VERY heavy Solar System, because in Celestia 1.3.1 pre9 I use:
Realistic-Earth16k.dds
Earth-Spec-8K.png
moon8k.dds
Mars-Shaded-16K.dds
and a lot of shuttles, probes, satellites, nebulae and whatelse .
After reading your message I've cheked again the differencies between the 1024x768 and the 1600x1200 video resolution, and believe me, they are all there! The image is absolutely more pleasant, and there is no loss of speed .
I have a powerful configuration anyhow, Athlon 2700 2.17 GHz with 1 GB 333 MHz Ram, a Nvidia GeForce4 Ti 4600 with 128 MB DRAM, and WINXP Home SP1. As you see it's very close to Meeja's one. And this should confirm that power gives quality, and, alas, high costs!
By

Andrea

Unfortunately for my humble computer, I've not been so lucky

Using my test settings below, but with my screen display set to 1280x1024x32 instead of my usual 1024x768x32, I fell to 1 fps when in Full screen mode.

Then I thought I'd try with a lower res Earth texture which is 4k DDS, but with all the other settings the same;

For 1280x1024x32 full screen I could only muster 7.5 fps, compared to;
1024x768x32 full screen at 12 fps

regards
TERRIER

Maybe these differences have something to do with the Mobo / AMD combination?

I tested this on my P4, 3.06 Ghz CPU and get the same frame rate for all screen resolutions from 1024 to 1600 in both 16 and 32 bit.

Weird.

meegja wrote:Ah ok ... I mean the screen resolution, the resolution of how the graphics card is displaying on the monitor .... not the size of the graphics used in Celestia.

oops, sorry about that, in that case comepletely disreguard my post

I have read somwhere about this very subject
But I can't remember all the techical details.

But it said that when running games, or graphic intensive programs,
If you run at a high end resolutions,
most modern games and programs will force the graphics to run through the graphic cards CPU and memory.
leaving more room for non graphical prosseces to run through the main CPU.

and if you run a game at 640 x 480 all the information would be run by the main CPU

I'm not sure how true any of this is, as it is something i remember reading a while ago.

I've got a Pentium 4 1.7GHz, windows 98SE, Geforce4 MX440... My screen res is ALWAYS set at 1280x1024. Celestia runs ok in windowed mode, better with the window maximised, and best (although I don't really use it much) in full screen. My desktop is full of files, and I have a thingy to change my background every 20mins or so- maybe that has something to do with it running better...? When it's in full screen then theres no taskbar to display- would that have much effect on FPS?

Jack,

Updating all those open windows and the background does take time.
If you reduce the number of things being drawn, those left will run that much faster. How noticable that difference is depends on the speed of your system. My system at home is slow enough that I always run with no background picture at all.

There's a right-mouse-button-popup-menu associated with the taskbar which includes an item that will iconize all the open windows immediately. (Under XP it's called "Show Desktop". I dunno what it is for W98.) You might give that a try to find out how much difference it makes for Celestia running in a window. (It'll iconize Celestia, too, so you'll have to open that window again.)

When you run Celestia full-screen, that's the only thing that's being updated. My system often takes quite a while to refresh all the open windows when I switch Celestia from full-screen back to windowed mode.

Home system:
256MB 500MHz P3 (2 CPUs), WinXP Pro SP1
128MB GF4 Ti4200 Det. 44.03 (2xAGP)

Selden, you are right all windows versions from win98 to winxp have the show desktop icon down in the system tray/start bar.