Celestia Forums

hi, i am a fellow astronomy/cosmology enthusiest who loves celestia. i have a modern 2ghz computer, 256ram and 32 vid 128 radeon. why does celestia crawl when i turn on night side lights or eclipse shadows or ring shadows?can anyone help me?

ps it worked just as poorly before i added any extras to the program

Unfortunately, you didn't specify the exact model number of your ATI card. You can find it in Celestia's Help menu.

Please read the "preliminary user's faq" in the Users Forum: Q1 and Q2.

Make sure you've downloaded and installed the most recent video drivers from ATI. Microsoft's drivers do everything in software and thus are very slow.

Also, it could be because your ATI card is an inexpensive design, omitting many hardware acceleration features. When operstions required for handling the eclipse shadows and the nightside lights are done by the CPU in software, they are very slow. The symptoms you describe are consistant with you having a RAGE card, which is a very old design. You need to consider upgrading to a modern card that implements OpenGL in hardware.

Post up what version of celestia you are using.
what operating system you are using.

a more detailed spec of you computer.
And what type of textures and size of textrures you are useing.

we cant help you much, without information.