Celestia Forums

I installed a gforce2 mx400 over the weekend and I'm very dissapointed with the results. Frame rate is very slow (jerky I'd say) to the point that I'm going to have to go back to the old agp card (very smooth).

I did have some problems with the BIOS settings when switching over, it wouldn't let me disable the onboard video. My machine is:

Intel Celeron 1.30 GHz
256 RAM.

Any suggestions?

bh wrote:I installed a gforce2 mx400 over the weekend and I'm very dissapointed with the results. Frame rate is very slow (jerky I'd say) to the point that I'm going to have to go back to the old agp card (very smooth).

I don't know what exactly you call a "new card", but the geforce 2 mx is more than 2 years old; a lot of time for a video card...

You talk about an old agp card... you don't mean the geforce is a PCI one, don't you ?

The Geforce 2 is old, but it can still run Celestia at a great speed. Methinks the problem lies elsewhere... do you have the latest nvidia drivers?

Yes, it's a pci card and, yes, I've installed the latest denonator drivers.
I'm running xp. Frame rate is very slow when orbiting the earth. I tend to judge this on the cloud animation at 10X speed. I can get it smoother by adjusting orientation, but it's very sticky. My earth textures are a mixture of jpg (earth texture) dds (cloud map) as well as a jpg for the specular texture. It does look stunning though so I guess I'll stick with it.

One other thing. I get a very noticeable banding effect on Rass' nebula, not a smooth gradation of colour. Still looks nice though.

Is there anything I can do uusing the openGL control panel in the display settings dialogue?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Don't forget that the MX (both GeForce2 and GeForce4 versions) lacks vertex and pixel shader hardware, so you won't be able to see ring shadows, specular highlights or bumpmaps.

[written later: you can actually see the specular reflection of the sun in the oceans, then? Well, scratch that misguided information.]

Also, some cloud definitions are very demanding. I've found that [on a GF4 Ti4200] PNG clouds render much faster than DDS clouds, for example.

Rendering many stars and galaxies will also slow the framerate significantly.

I have pixel and vertex shading, turning them both off does speed things up (a little), but that rather defeats the object.

selden wrote:Don't forget that the MX (both GeForce2 and GeForce4 versions) lacks vertex and pixel shader hardware, so you won't be able to see ring shadows, specular highlights or bumpmaps.

[written later: you can actually see the specular reflection of the sun in the oceans, then? Well, scratch that misguided information.]

Also, some cloud definitions are very demanding. I've found that PNG clouds render much faster than DDS clouds, for example.

Rendering many stars and galaxies will also slow the framerate significantly.

While the GeForce2 and GeForce4 MX lack DirectX 8 style pixel shaders, they do have enough programmability in the pixel pipe for Celestia to do its tricks. So you'll get specular reflects, bump mapping, haze effects, etc. Vertex shaders are emulated in software on these boards, and performance is generally good enough with recent CPUs.

--Chris

Chris,

Thanks for the clarification! That's very good to know.

I'm sure I recall reading previous postings about serious limitations in MX boards. Presumably most of the deficiencies I read about are things that have been alleviated in recent versions (v40?) of the Detonator library and Celestia.

Since I'm a geforce 2 MX owner too, I could affirm this kind of card could manage celestia. But my card is AGP, not PCI; this could do the difference... Moreover, I'm running 29.42 nvidia drivers, maybe try this version.

From my experience, I can run every texture I want, until 16k; but I use only the dds versions, converting textures from png or jpg where they doesn't meet this format.

If you want try to convert, follow this link :

http://developer.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO ... ion_plugin

and go under "attachment"; Photoshop (hoping you own it) will be the best friend of your Celestia

I think your problem is the fact the card in question is PCI. Its a slower bus by half 33MHz versus 66MHz for AGP ver 1. That should be the problem. I too have a PCI GeForce2 MX 400 and its slow with Celestia as well. Mine happens to be one the slowest GeForce cards ever made. It was made by the Pine company and they definetly blew the design somewhere along the line. I can't even use this card in any PC with and AGP bus without the system crashing. I hope yours isn't made by Pine because if it is thats whats the problem might be. Just try and use it in dual monitor mode. That might be your best bet. Good luck.

Guys, many thanks for your help so far...

If it's the pci card then I'm just going to have to put up with it for now.
I really can't afford to throw any more money at my computer at the moment.

I will look into changing my earth textures to lower res formats (grumble)and see if that will make any differece to the performance.

There is another posibility that I didn't think of before. You said you had another 3D card installed before the GeForce. It is posible that the OpenGL32.dll is for the other card and not for your GeForce card. When you ran the installer for the detonator drivers it should have replaced this file with an NVidia version of it. You can right click on the opengl32.dll file and see you made the version on your system. If its made by Microsoft or the vender of your other card try removing it from your system or system32 directory to someplace safe and run the installer again and after a reboot see if you now have an NVidia one. If you are using XP this might not work as XP will simply put back the Microsoft version that shipped with it. This version forces your OpenGL apps to run in software mode wich is very slow and might be whats going on here. The other thing to do is if you have an old harddrive or you can borrow one from a friend and do a clean install of Windows on it and then install the Detonator drivers on this new install and see if you get better performance. If you see a big diference that I think that your system registry in you original install of Windows has some left over garbage from the other video card. At this point you need to see if doing a clean install is the best thing to do. As a rule and not many people know this you should do a (dirty install) of windows every six months at the minimum if you are using any version of Windows 9x/ME. A dirty install is just a reinstall on top over your present install and it often cleans things up in situations like this. Just be forwarned that any updates and patches will have to be redownloaded and reinstalled. You can give this a try as well. I build and work on computers for a living so I think this could posibly get you going in the right direction. Hope this helps and good luck.

Don...

Thanks for looking into this for me. Yes, every time I install the drivers good old microsoft has it's own 'opengl32.dll' in there. "Don't let microsoft get you down" Mike says.

This time I've really got the latest NVIDIA drivers from their site (Dec 2002).

Is there anyway I can get NVIDIA's opengl32.dll and just replace the microsoft one?

This really is a let down for me as I've spent light years trying to sort this out, only finding my way blocked by Microsoft.

I don't really know what else to do.

Regards...

Bob.

Well I need to know what version of Windows your running. Also who made your video card. I need the vender not the chip maker aka NVidia.
I have asked a few people elsewhere and there seems to be a problem with some PCI GeForce2 cards working well with an AGP bus on the motherboard. Its kind of a strange thing that happens. On some systems these PCI cards when installed on system with an AGP bus are treated as AGP cards by the NVidia drivers. As the cards are not AGP but PCI this plays havoc with the system. I have had this problem personaly with my little Pine GeForce2 MX400 card. It works fine in an older system without an AGP bus or with a system with built in video. But if I put it in a system with an AGP bus the thing slows to a crawl. It sounds like this is whats happening to you. I checked into the OpenGL32.dll thing and technically this should make no diference. I was thinking of an old trick for Quake GL that had this issue. In the old days of Quake GL it was written with a custom opengl32.dll for 3Dfx cards. If you wanted to run it on a system with an NVidia TNT you had to copy the opengl32.dll from your windows system directory to your Quake directory. So as you can see I don't think this is the right direction. Celestia accesses the NVidia drivers directly so this can't be the issue after all. So we are ack to square one.
If you have access to and older PC that has no AGP slot in it, try putting the card in it and load up a drive with windows and load the newest driver and see if your performance is better. I know this sounds like a lot of work but we are trying to debug this thing. If the card seems to work pretty good and you can load Celestia with desent size textures and get a decent framerate then you just found the problem. This means your GeForce card will probably never work right in a system with an AGP bus. I have the same problem so I use my card in a system that has built in video and it works well enough. Hope this helps some. The next thing to consider is it getting cooled enough. Does the card have have a heatsink and fan. If it just has a heatsink no fan try mounting a small cooling fan on the heatsink and see if this helps things. If not than overheat isn't the problem and what I would do next is just start saving a little money here and there and buy a newer or at lease an AGP GeForce2 or better used somewhere. If you check with your local computer shops and local pawn shops you find one at a real good price. I have a GeForce2 MX200 AGP with 32megs of SDRAM and I was going to sell it but it has been tied to the death 3 monitors in the month so I can't trust this card and I wouldn't let anyone have a card like this till it could be fully tested. If everything checks out I could let it go for about $20 US funds. Hey its an option anyway. Let me now how things go.

Don, I don't quite know how its happened, but its working!!

I installed the latest drivers from the nvidia site and installed them, rebooted, reinstalled them, tweaked the open gl controls, rebooted, used the TweakXP graphic tweak, rebooted eh voila!... I reallydon't know how or why. Celestia runs smooth now over the Earth at just about any speed I choose.

Thanks for your help. Wow. Now for those 8K textures!

Glad to here it. Sometimes you just have kick Windows in the butt and force the issue with it. Now what ever you do don't change anything for a while. I or anybody else can tell you what ever you did might not be able to repeated easily or ever agian. Each install of Windows is an adventure. Sometimes in fustration and sometimes you will come out smiling.
No two installs are ever realy the same. Its almost like Windows is alive. Isn't that a scary thought. I have installed Windows on many computers over the years as a part of my job and I can tell you that sometimes things sail along like theres not a care in the world. Sometimes I get bit in the butt and have to do a reinstall and then everything is just fine from there out. If you have the means I highly recomend making a backup of your present setings and posibly imaging your hard drive on to another drive just in case. That way if something were to happen, like a power outage or spike that might mess up Windows, you have a working backup to fall back on.
Don