Celestia Forums

Hi, any help would be appreciated.

I downloaded Celestia and I am getting very weird graphics corruption. Everything is very bitmap-ey and the window is very black, most things are invisible. I'll attach a few screenshots here to let you know what I mean.

My system specs are as follows,

Vista x64 Ultimate SP1
AMD Phenom x4 9850
ATI Radeon 4850 512MB
4GB RAM
October 19th Catalyst drivers

I tried running Celestia in XP SP2 compatibility mode, didn't work. UAC is off (it's running as admin already). Can't figure out how to make this work, the app is essentially unusable.

Here are two screenshots, one from the opening animation sequence, the second is I presume a continent on Earth but badly corrupted.

Anyone know what's going on?

Just a quick post FYI...

Use the OpenGL 2.0 render path, and get the very latest drivers for your
graphics card. Must be OpenGL 2.0 compatible.

Sadly, those pictures do look like buggy OpenGL drivers. ATI traditionally has had poorer OpenGL support than what Nvidia provides.

You might try disabling hardware graphics support entirely. It should be an option in the advanced display management of Vista itself (not in ATI's control panel). Some people have had good luck by first disabling hardware acceleration and then using the slider to increase the amount of acceleration that Windows uses.

Also, make sure you use drivers downloaded from AMD/ATI, *not* the ones provided by Windows Update. The OpenGL routines provided by Microsoft often are damaged.

--- edit ---

Yeah I had gotten it straight from the ATI website just last month. I decided to update regardless to the Nov 19th Catalysts, and boom, problem fixed. Looks like there was just an issue with 4850 cards, the October Catalyst drivers, and OpenGL 2.

Makes no sense, but whatever, it's fixed now.

Thanks for all your replies.