Celestia Forums

Obviously, Celestia is worth buying a new computer and graphics card, but until I can scrape together enough cash to do so, I wonder if anyone could give me some tips for getting it to run as well as possible on my system.

I have a Celeron 500 with 256MB RAM and a Voodoo 3000 video card. The low-res version of Celestia runs pretty well in a window (between 10-20 fps depending on what's on screen). I know I can't run any of the big beautiful Geforce textures, but are there any medium-sized textures my card could handle (I noticed a folder marked "medium" in the texture directory)?

Also, whenever I try to switch Celestia to full-screen mode, the program crashes horribly - the screen becomes snow and the computer completely locks up. Is there a fix for this?

I would recommend that you get rid of that Voodoo card as there is no support for it anymore...Considering also you can get a GeForce Ti200 64 Meg card for around $150 now which isnt as bad as the GF4 which is still 3 times that much and not much faster I got the card just to see the bump mapping effects...Believe me you would wonder why you ever kept the Voodoo after getting the Force!

Good luck...

Make sure you motherboard supports agp4x if your going to upgrade your video card. I have a GF2MX400 which ran like a dog at 2xAGP.

Unfortunately my computer doesn't have an AGP slot, just PCI. Nor can the motherboard handle a faster processor (I was pretty stupid about such things back when I bought this HP Pavilion - about the only thing that's upgradable is the memory). So the Voodoo3 is probably about the best card this computer can handle.

Looks like a new motherboard then too!

I good price/performance system would be something like:

AMD Athlon XP 1800+
Abit KR7A-RAID mobo
512MB of DDR SDRAM
GeForce 3 Ti 200 or GeForce 4 Ti xxxx (as budget allows, but no GF2, or GF4MX cards).
And the rest as needed.

Should cost around ?480-?500 tops.

I just picked up a cheap new laptop (Toshiba 1.06 Celeron with a lowly 4 megs of video ram for $900), and wasn't even going to try it, but I loaded up Celestia anyway and was amazed that it runs pretty well! I've got it in a fairly small window, but hey, it runs smooth and now I can take it with me wherever I go.