Celestia Forums

Not sure what was planned for 1.3.1 in the way of fixing the display problems with ATI cards.. I use a Radeon 8500 128MB in Linux, and I basically have to use Multitexture mode.. if I put it to DOT3 ARBVP I get all the usual problems.. big holes in saturn, no night-side lights, no lighting on jupiter's moons, bizarre specular shine on earth's dark side, bright night sides of planets that actually do light up properly (night side is only slightly darker than day side), etc.

I read something that there will be some more advanced features planned for 1.3.2 that work on radon 9500 and up.. any news on us lower-level users? The only planet that really works well and shows a difference for me is Mercury when I turn on the DOT3 ARBVP mode, with the bump mapping.. wish all the planets could show that detail for me, too.

I compiled from CVS after seeing an email from Chris about 1.3.1 being ready to be tested on the developers mailing lsit.. so it's recent as of a couple hours ago.

Sadly, as best anyone can tell, the problems Celestia has on lower numbered models of ATI cards are due to bugs in ATI's OpenGL drivers that ATI has been notified about but is not interested in fixing. Also, since the graphically knowledgable Celestia developers have Nvidia cards, not ATI, they have no way to even try to find workarounds to the bugs.

Sorry.

yeah.. well if there's anything i can do to help debug...

Well after a bit of investigating I found what seems to be causing the problem... PNG transparency in the rings. That, coupled with ring shadows, was making a lot of badness. Saturn looks and renders fine and fast if I turn off ring shadows and look at it edge-on (so that saturn is not trying to see through the rings at all). Does that help at all?

I've been reporting bugs to ATI about this for every Catalyst and Linux driver release. I hope that they will some day at least try to look at the bugs and try to fix them. One thing you can do is to use the Driver feedback form and also report the problems. In latest Windows version they at least fixed the texture corruption on the planet but the rendering is still slow as hell. Oh and the rings become very ugly when ring shadows are enabled. So just report and report and they will have to notice it.

Interesting. I just upgraded my Catalyst drivers in Windows.. Saturn works fine now, except for with ring shadows on.. turn those on and *boom* slowness to the nth degree. I'll start sending in those bug reports. Thanks!