Celestia Forums

Drivers version 8183
These are "leaked drivers" from Hewlett Packard for their workstations.
They are supposed to fix some SLI issues as well as an unspecified list of bugs and performance issues.
OpenGl string info is 2.0.1
No problem here so far. Got a slight increase in fps numbers in Celestia.
Go grab them there:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTcw

Sigh... seeing the thread's title I thought the 85 series was out, no joy.

85 is when things should start getting interesting with composited desktop becoming really useable, I'm not sure if they'll make much of a difference for Celestia though.

Well, composite is more desktop eye-candy stuff than anything else.
What I am waiting for is the extended flexibility of multihead configuration that should be included in the next official release.
Linux drivers are lagging behind windows in this area.
For example, it is currently impossible to specify a DVI panel as primary display if anything vga is connected elsewhere in the setup.
Another limitation is about different GPUs being used concurrently. Opengl will only work on the primary video card and will ignore the secondary card, which is a shame.
Third, there is the issue of setups that mix different screen resolutions. Nview does not work as it should and we are stuck with Xinerama which is slower. This is a key issue for people who have an HDTV as a PC display in their multihead mix.
If the new drivers address all these issues (some hints about this have been leaked by Nvidia), it will be a great step.
It will have an indirect impact on Celestia for multi-display configurations.
For example, I would like to have two instances of celestia running on two different video cards, with, say, Kstar or another synthetic sky mapping program, and some sourcecode editor or what else running on their own displays.
Hopefully, another progess will be made with on-the-fly SLI switching (choice between super fast rendering on one display or fast rendering accross four displays).
Latest rumors say that the new driver set will be out early April.