Celestia Forums

I??m pissed of.I have been obliged to buy Nvidia cards because has fewer bugs in Celestia,but now I see that the Radeon X700 Pro is better than the Geforce 6600 GT in some tests in video cards reviews and it??s much more cheaper.I saw in my country,a X700 Pro 256 MB for 247 dollars,but the 6600 GT 128 MB was 100 dollars more expensive.I bought the 6600 GT,because Celestia demands Nvidia cards.And the 6800 WAS NOT AVAILABLE IN 128 mb version!
When this dictature of Celestia will be over?I am tired of losing money...

Daniel,

As has been mentioned many times, the ATI Radeon 9500 cards (or better) do have most of the features used by the current versions of Celestia. Only Celestia's Haze feature cannot be drawn by them. Haze is drawn using Nvidia proprietary routines. (That may change in the next major release after v1.4.0)

However, current ATI cards do not have all of the standard OpenGL features that are available in Nvidia 6nnn cards. In particular, they do not have the most recent OpenGL shader features, but Celestia does not yet use those shaders. (Chris has said that the new shaders probably will be used in the next major release after v1.4.0. I'm guessing that may be in 2006.)

Those new shader routines supposedly will be available in the next version of ATI graphics hardware, due at the end of 2005. Those will be their top-of-the-line cards, however, and will be extremely expensive: more than $600 U.S. Less expensive versions probably will be available in summer of 2006.

I hope this clarifies things a little.

selden wrote:Daniel,

Only Celestia's Haze feature cannot be drawn by them. Haze is drawn using Nvidia proprietary routines. (That may change in the next major release after v1.4.0)

Haze does NOT work in the most "modern" and fastest OpenGL2.0 render path!

Bye Fridger

Fridger,

Yup. You agree with me
Haze is drawn only by

Render path: OpenGL vertex program, Nvidia combiners

That path works only on Nvidia cards. That's what I mean by "Nvidia proprietary".

selden wrote:Fridger,

Yup. You agree with me
Haze is drawn only by

Render path: OpenGL vertex program, Nvidia combiners

That path works only on Nvidia cards. That's what I mean by "Nvidia proprietary".

right...

Bye Fridger

danielj wrote:I??m pissed of.
...
When this dictature of Celestia will be over?I am tired of losing money...

Daniel,

depending on peoples requirements, there are also arguments in favour of NVIDIA cards that are NOT related to Celestia: Unlike ATI cards, NVIDIA offers UNIFIED driver code for Windows and Linux. Since I am using both, depending on the application, NVIDIA is the brand of choice for me.

Also I distrust software that for so long continued to produce drivers with LOTS of OpenGL bugs. Although ATI have recently tried to be more reliable, my trust will NOT return anymore...Instead of OpenGL, they mainly concentrated on DirectX, which is not of interest to me.

Bye Fridger

Yep...I bought a new machine because of Celestia...and then had to fit a NVidea...a lowley GForce2.

I nearly gave up...if you want it...you gotta buy it! It's as simple as that.

Speaking of ATI cards.... I have learned that I cannot use DDS files but I cannot even see the city lights on the night side of earth.... it might depend on my ATI Radeon X600?? Thanks

Please download and install the most recent graphics drivers from ATI.
Also, make sure you have hardware acceleration turned on all the way.

And to this I would like to add that Nvidia has the best Linux support of the industry.
ATI Linux support has been (and still is) rough to say the less.

Boux wrote:And to this I would like to add that Nvidia has the best Linux support of the industry.
ATI Linux support has been (and still is) rough to say the less.

See my post a little up...

Bye Fridger

I have a recent ATI card (X850 XT), and I can confirm that ATI TOTALLY SUCKS at drivers ! Those guys are a SHAME !

You can feel my frustration here. ATI is the WORST video card manufacturer, about drivers, especially for OpenGL.

It's very hard to resist the temptation to buy a train ticket to go to their headquarters (here in Canada) and to kick their butt with my mountain boots.

Ok I finally found out where to look for the hardware acceleration and iIT IS ALREADY TURNED ALL THE WAY ON - about loading new ATI drivers, the computer is brand new and I don't want to mess up things yet but thanks Selden for the advice

t00fri wrote:

Boux wrote:And to this I would like to add that Nvidia has the best Linux support of the industry.
ATI Linux support has been (and still is) rough to say the less.

See my post a little up...

Bye Fridger

I have seen your post of course.
It did not prevent me to add my own comment based on years of practice with all kind of graphic solutions under all flavours of Dos, Windows, MacOs, Osx, SGI, Sun, Linux, with all Nvidia generations since when it was Riva, 3dfx, Matrox, Rendition, FireGl, 3dLabs and other very proprietary exotic GPUs for military simulation and data display. Applications ranging from professional web design to video editing and 3d animation.
Currently Nvidia clearly deserves the crown with their Quadro line.
For sure, kiddy gamerzzz are interested mostly in 3dmark scores in D3D and fps numbers in the latest shoot'em up and have no clue about mission-critical requirements in a production environment.