Display Problem

[Dollan]

Alright, I got a new computer, a 2.8ghz Gateway with 760mb of RAM. The card is on the motherboard, and is an Intel 82845G/GL/GE/PE/GV Graphics Controller with 64mb of memory.

However, when I go to some of the worlds I've made, particularily those with 2k clouds, surface maps, and bump maps, the entire program drops to a massive crawl, and the planet itself is covered with a plethora of black triangles that are constantly blinking. I tried, on a hunch, disabling the bump maps, and that seemed to help.

So the question is, is there a setting that will help me with this, or is this a symptom of using a video controller off of a motherboard?

The nice part is, for the first time EVER, I've been able to view planetary ring shaodws....

...John...

[selden]

It's a symptom of using an Intel graphics controller. Nvidia and ATI also provide integrated motherboard graphics chipsets.

Do 1K textures have similar problems?

If you report the blinking problem to Intel, they may be able to provide a driver version which fixes the blinking bug.

Slow speed for large textures suggests that the textures are being swapped in and out to main memory. Alternatively, most integrated graphics chipsets directly map to a portion of the system's main memory and have very little dedicated graphics memory. This leaves much less main memory available than you might expect. As a result, Celestia may be paging badly. You have to read the fine print in the hardware manual to find out which cost-reduction techniques they're using.

[Dollan]

Thanks, Selden.

I was planning on buying a PCI card anyway (I've found some good ones at TigerDirect for a fair price), but I'll just have to wait until pay day.

Hopefully, once I buy a card, I'll still be able to see the ring shadows...!

...John...

[Dollan]

Okay, a brief update. I restarted my system after a bunch of updates were installed in accordance with my University's security demands, and a small icon appeared on my task bar for the graphics card. Labeled Intel Extreme Graphics, it gave me the option to switch from True Color (where it had been set) to high color.

Problem solved! Celestia even runs a bit more smoothly. The only bummer is that the wonderful splash screen doesn't show up when I start the program, but of course I can live without that (I didn't even know that there was one until I started playing with Celestia on an XP machine a couple of months ago). So I guess the lesson is, even when you aren't told to restart the computer after installing stuff, it is a good idea to do it anyway.

...John...