Celestia Forums

I've been testing Celestia 1.5.0 on a number of new iMacs (ATI,RadeonHD2600). I see no stars when using 'fuzzy' or 'scaled', and when displayed as 'points' the stars are large square blobs.

My previous versions 1.4.1 works fine.

Tried a quick search of recent topics - some mention of 'sprites' but no definitive answer.

Any advice gratefully received.

Paul

Paul L wrote:I've been testing Celestia 1.5.0 on a number of new iMacs (ATI,RadeonHD2600). I see no stars when using 'fuzzy' or 'scaled', and when displayed as 'points' the stars are large square blobs.

My previous versions 1.4.1 works fine.

Tried a quick search of recent topics - some mention of 'sprites' but no definitive answer.

Any advice gratefully received.

Paul

There's a bug in the latest Radeon drivers for the Mac. We'll release a new version of Celestia with a workaround soon. Celestia is not the only application suffering from this bug:

http://lists.apple.com/archives/mac-ope ... 00126.html

--Chris

I also have been suffering from this problem with iMac (mid 2007).
The 10.5.2 update and Leopard Graphics Update didn't solve this...

Since I'm also one of the unlucky Mac ATI users I shouldn't be laughing, but the title on that opengl-mac liist posting just cracked me up. "What the poop" indeed... oh wait, good lord! I have to put Radeon HD cards running on the latest OS on the point sprite black list too?!

Sui,
Paul:

Could you reply to this post with the contents of your OpenGL Info? (In Celestia, Help > OpenGL Info menu) A workaround for ATI cards will be in the next update to Celestia as Chris mentions, but this is being done case-by-case, based on information listed in OpenGL Info.

Apparently, ALL ATI cards are afflicted by the sprites problem, on a Mac. This situation (from the ATI and Apple guys) is really unacceptable !

The video card support from Apple is almost totally non-existant. And when we buy a Mac, we don't have much choice, for the video card. Apple sucks !

Cham wrote: And when we buy a Mac, we don't have much choice, for the video card. Apple sucks !

That would be a 100% reason for me to NEVER buy a MAC

F.

t00fri wrote:That would be a 100% reason for me to NEVER buy a MAC

Well, you DO have a choice in the case of the large towers (Mac Pro). There are some NVidia cards available for them, but even then, the choice isn't very large.

The problem isn't the cards themselves. It's the drivers which sucks, and the companies (mostly ATI and Apple) aren't very responsive, when it comes to support and updates for their video card drivers.

Cham wrote:

t00fri wrote:That would be a 100% reason for me to NEVER buy a MAC

Well, you DO have a choice in the case of the large towers (Mac Pro). There are some NVidia cards available for them, but even then, the choice isn't very large.

The problem isn't the cards themselves. It's the drivers which sucks, and the companies (mostly ATI and Apple) aren't very responsive, when it comes to support and updates for their video card drivers.

I know it's the driver issue. That's why for me it is intolerable that with a MAC I cannot update all the time to the latest driver for my graphics card.

F.

Cham wrote:

t00fri wrote:That would be a 100% reason for me to NEVER buy a MAC

Well, you DO have a choice in the case of the large towers (Mac Pro). There are some NVidia cards available for them, but even then, the choice isn't very large.

The problem isn't the cards themselves. It's the drivers which sucks, and the companies (mostly ATI and Apple) aren't very responsive, when it comes to support and updates for their video card drivers.

I know it's the driver issue. That's why for me it is intolerable that with a MAC I cannot update all the time to the latest driver for my graphics card.

F.

The degree of brokenness in the Mac Radeon drivers point sprite support is astonishing. It seems to have been a problem for two years, with symptoms ranging from in-your-face obvious (no texturing) to Boeing-747-dropped-on-your-head obvious (complete machine lockup.) And it's only gotten worse: didn't point sprites used to work with Radeon HD 2xxx cards? They should really just turn off the extension on the drivers, but I think it's required in order for them to claim OpenGL 2.0 support.

The best workaround is probably to just disable point sprite support on any Mac with an ATI card in it. I don't want to count on this ever working. I guess I'll just have to code a fallback for cmod point sprite support--really, the last thing I want to be doing with my time.

--Chris

chris wrote:...with symptoms ranging from in-your-face obvious (no texturing) to Boeing-747-dropped-on-your-head obvious (complete machine lockup.)

That was nicely said!

dirkpitt wrote:Could you reply to this post with the contents of your OpenGL Info? (In Celestia, Help > OpenGL Info menu) A workaround for ATI cards will be in the next update to Celestia as Chris mentions, but this is being done case-by-case, based on information listed in OpenGL Info.

OK, here it is:

chris wrote:The best workaround is probably to just disable point sprite support on any Mac with an ATI card in it.

Are you sure you meant all Mac ATI cards Chris? The code change for stars would be easy enough.

dirkpitt wrote:

chris wrote:The best workaround is probably to just disable point sprite support on any Mac with an ATI card in it.

Are you sure you meant all Mac ATI cards Chris? The code change for stars would be easy enough.

Do we know of any that are for certain working right now?

--Chris

I suspect there may be some confusion with CMOD point sprites, and the star sprite. In my case, the CMOD point sprites aren't working at all, while the OGL2 star rendering works very nicely (well, before DW changed it in SVN).

Cham wrote:I suspect there may be some confusion with CMOD point sprites, and the star sprite. In my case, the CMOD point sprites aren't working at all, while the OGL2 star rendering works very nicely (well, before DW changed it in SVN).

There's no confusion about that--the only unknown is which ATI graphics cards have working point sprites under Mac OS X.

There are two methods of star rendering in Celestia: one uses point sprites, the other doesn't. Point sprites are faster, but we've had to turn them off for some ATI cards under Mac OS X. It appears that we need to disable them for still more cards.

CMOD point sprites are rendered using OpenGL point sprites exclusively. If OpenGL point sprites don't work properly on your graphics card, then you won't see CMOD point sprites. Currently, there's no fallback path for CMOD point sprites--my hope was that Apple/ATI would get it together and fix their drivers so I wouldn't have to write any extra code.

--Chris

Curiously though, stars render fine on version 1.4.1 of Celestia. In fact, my experiences of Celestia on a variety of macs over the years have been nothing but positive. It's only 1.5 in which stars are not rendering correctly (at least for me).

Paul

Paul L wrote:Curiously though, stars render fine on version 1.4.1 of Celestia. In fact, my experiences of Celestia on a variety of macs over the years have been nothing but positive. It's only 1.5 in which stars are not rendering correctly (at least for me).

Paul

That's because in earlier version, Celestia didn't use point sprites to render stars. 1.5.0 does use point sprites because they give a noticeable performance advantage. With point sprites, only one vertex needs to be generated per star instead of four.

--Chris

Thanks for the clarification Chris.

Paul

chris wrote:

dirkpitt wrote:Are you sure you meant all Mac ATI cards Chris?

Do we know of any that are for certain working right now?

--Chris

No, I was just checking to see if you meant it since it's going to be affecting all Mac ATI users.

BTW, I think that blacklisting by the word "ATI" is enough to cover all known ATI renderers on the Mac but I'm not 100% sure. Other platforms seem to have stranger renderer names like "RADEON xxx", "ASUS xxx" etc.