Celestia Forums

I have just installed two 4870 1GB in Crossfire mode in this system, to play with.
Latest drivers and Catalyst Control Center (Vista 64).
All OpenGl and DirectX apps are running uber fast and fine as expected, at 1080p resolution.
One exception though: Celestia
Well, it runs very fast with Crossfire activated, whatever the number/size of objects being rendered.
But ... whenever right-clicking on an object while in full screen rendering, the context menu is not visible.
It is there somehow because blindly/randomly clicking around in the supposed menu area will trigger one of the choices that are available.
It's like the context menu is not overlayed onto the forefront but stays 'behind' the rendering screen.
When Celestia is running in windowed mode, the context menu pops up to the forefront and behaves as expected.
Any idea?

That's happened to me before too.

Reiko wrote:That's happened to me before too.

Hi, Reiko!
Did you find the root cause?

This really sounds like an ATI driver bug, likely one that's specific to Crossfire configurations. Celestia is showing the right-click menu using the conventional Windows calls--nothing tricky at all. My guess is that Crossfire in full-screen mode is optimized for games, which always draw popup menus with OpenGL or Direct3D calls. ATI probably didn't bother trying to get standard windows to work in fullscreen mode simply because games never use them.

--Chris

Boux wrote:

Reiko wrote:That's happened to me before too.

Hi, Reiko!
Did you find the root cause?

No I haven't. I've had some other menu bugs too that I can't figure out the cause of.

chris wrote:This really sounds like an ATI driver bug, likely one that's specific to Crossfire configurations. Celestia is showing the right-click menu using the conventional Windows calls--nothing tricky at all. My guess is that Crossfire in full-screen mode is optimized for games, which always draw popup menus with OpenGL or Direct3D calls. ATI probably didn't bother trying to get standard windows to work in fullscreen mode simply because games never use them.

--Chris

Could this also be what causes the menu to be captured in a screenshot 60% of the time?

chris wrote:This really sounds like an ATI driver bug, likely one that's specific to Crossfire configurations. Celestia is showing the right-click menu using the conventional Windows calls--nothing tricky at all. My guess is that Crossfire in full-screen mode is optimized for games, which always draw popup menus with OpenGL or Direct3D calls. ATI probably didn't bother trying to get standard windows to work in fullscreen mode simply because games never use them.

--Chris

Hmmm,
the bug is still there with Crossfire disabled ... and to be sure, I have physically removed one card from the system.
I have installed the FireGl workstation adapter drivers to further investigate.
The bug is still there.
I cannot imagine such a bug could stay unspotted for long in a professional environment.
The API call somehow works because it returns a regular windows pointer replacing the Celestia cursor. The menu is active but not drawn on the forefront.
So currently, Celestia is mostly unusable on the latest ATI hardware.
I will send a bug report to the ATI drivers dev team inviting them to specifically check Celestia behaviour.
Do not hold your breath though.