Celestia Forums

I had been using Celestia 1.4.1 with an older GeForce 2 GTS NVIDIA video card and older NVIDIA drivers on a PC running Windows XP Pro SP2 fully patched. Everything was working OK. I upgraded to a newer NVIDIA GeForce Series 7 7300GT video card with more recent drivers. Celestia started to crash on startup with the failure being traced to a .dll file with a file name that stated with the letters nv. I think that it had something to do with OpenGL. After some research on the NVIDIA forums I read that newer NVIDIA drivers OpenGL support require a CPU capable of supporting the SSE instruction set. NVIDIA said nothing about this in their system requirements section of their driver release notes. I was running an older Athlon T'bird that didn't have SSE support. After replacing the T'bird with an Athlon XP 2200+ and updating the motherboard BIOS, WCPUID said that SSE was supported. Now Celestia works OK.

Celestia wasn't the only 3D application that was having problems running with the new video card and drivers when using the Athlon T'bird processor. FlightGear, and Blender also failed. Google Earth was only partially functional. The overhead photos stopped being displayed when zooming down towards ground level.

Now everything works with the new Athlon XP 2200+ CPU.

That's great that you figured out what was happening, but it worries me that
these things keep changing so rapidly. Used to be that you could keep your
machine working for about a year before some new technology screwed it
up. Now, it can happen within a week. Sheesh!

I STILL think that I hold the world's record for productivity from a single
PC though... I used my - some say PATHETIC - PC, a Gateway Intel 386
for 13 years. From 1994 until 2007.

Take care, Bob

P.S. - Don't get me wrong here. I LOVE the new technology. It's just that
you really DO have to be a rocket scientist to keep up with the things now.