Celestia Forums

i have a athlon64 3500+ with 1GB RAM and a 6600GT 128MB gfx card

celestia runs very well, but only with the default textures ... with the improved textures for Earth that i downloaded ( 64K Jestr Earth Mark I ) it runs pretty slowly. I guess that i must improve my PC...

But what is more crtical for Celestia to add? Should i buy more RAM first or a new gfx card? What will help performance more?

Jester's "64K" texture is a virtual texture.

That means that it loads lots of small images to display the surface. It runs slowly because any motion of the viewpoint causes more images to be loaded from disk. In other words, you need a faster disk. *Much* faster.

In principle you could implement a "RAM disk" in memory. I'm sure drivers are available, although I've never bothered. Copy all the Addons you want to have maximal performance into that "disk" before you start Celestia.

You'll get better run-time performance with one of the large all-in-one textures, although Celestia will pause while it's loading the image. Larger images require more memory in Celestia, and, again, a RAM disk would help reduce the load time.

In other words, more memory will help in one way or the other, but not without other changes, too.

Your computer is better than mine,since I have only an Athlon64 3000 and I don??t think Celestia run slowly in my system(only a few times).Maybe you are trying to run in 1280X1024 and with AA and AF.The better choice is no AA and 800X600 and with nebula and galaxy render off.I am using BMNG 64K and unlike you,I don??t have enough money to upgrade my system;only in 2007 or at least at the end of 2006.Unfourtanetelly,here in Brazil,the CPU prices are almost the same as 6 months ago.
Do you suggest me to give up larger textures of Earth?

Lothar_GR wrote:i have a athlon64 3500+ with 1GB RAM and a 6600GT 128MB gfx card

celestia runs very well, but only with the default textures ... with the improved textures for Earth that i downloaded ( 64K Jestr Earth Mark I ) it runs pretty slowly. I guess that i must improve my PC...

But what is more crtical for Celestia to add? Should i buy more RAM first or a new gfx card? What will help performance more?

Of course im not suggesting something like that, i just wanted to ask what helps celestia more, a better gfx card or more memory since i plan to upgrade my pc ( probably buy more memory ) sometime before summer

Sadly here in Greece too CPU prices and PC prices in general are quite expensive ... the cpu i have costs around 210 euros now and the most expensive CPU i know costs around 750 euros ( A64 FX-55 ) but im sure that there are CPU's that cost even more ...