Celestia Forums

i have a ASUS V9440 MAGIC V52.16 128 GeForce4 MX 4000/AGP/SSE2 card.....

is there limit on textures i can download?

2k,4k,8k,16k?

i think i have a 2k limit....

but what kind of card i have to buy to see for example a 32/64 k texture?

or it is a question of updating DRIVERS....mine are 06/10/2003...

glintscollide wrote:i have a ASUS V9440 MAGIC V52.16 128 GeForce4 MX 4000/AGP/SSE2 card.....

is there limit on textures i can download?

See the FAQ on textures HERE, but
keep in mind that you can only go as large as your OpenGL drivers and
graphics card will allow you to go.

Click on Celestiaa's Help tab at the top of your screen, and then click on
the OpenGL info tab. This will give you some idea of what size textures you can use.

On my machine, I only get:

Max simultaneous textures: 2
Max texture size: 1024

But, you should be able to display more and larger textures on your
machine.

Hope that helps, Bob

In practice the limit only applies to nebulae, galaxies and rings.

maxim

There are two different limits:
The maximum texture size which Celestia prints in the OpenGL info. This applies to rings, nebulae etc.
The amount of memory in your graphics card - i.e. performance suffers when too many textures (or very big textures) have to be displayed at once, and rendering errors can happen when not enough memory is available. One has to consider that DDS textures take exactly the same amount of memory in your graphics card as they take on your HD, while JPG/PNG textures take width*height*3 Bytes, which is much more memory than they use on HD and also much more than a DDS texture of identical dimensions. A 32k textures would need 1.5GB of memory, which can't work on today's systems. But you can use a Virtual Texture (VT) for this, consisting of many small tiles. Celestia only loads those tiles which are currently needed, so much less memory is needed, making 32k or even more possible. So a VT even with very high resolution works on old graphic cards with e.g. only 32MB memory, though you'll notice delays when zooming in (when Celestia has to load new tiles from HD).

HTH,

Harald