Celestia Forums

I realize that this is a free program and am not complaining. But I believe the minimum system requirements should be changed to a system with AT LEAST 2Ghz, 1GB Ram, a recent video card with AT LEAST 128MB if not 256MB. The overload of the cpu and sytem and video ram is seriously troubling. I have an AMD Athlon XP 1800 running WinXP(SP2) with 512MB DDR ram and a Geforce2 MX/MX 400 with 64MB. Running Celestia v1.3.2 with no addons is basically OK, but still has some lag issues. Throw in a few Nebulae and some higher res planet textures and not only does it get choppier, but will skip entire scene transitions or even crash to a runtime error.



The only thing I have running are planets and stars, every other option I have turned off. Running in a window at 1024X768. Antialiasing off. I have the newest nVidia driver and have it optimized properly. This isn't the newest or fastest system out there, but it runs everythin else I've thrown at it like a champ and I shudder to think of what running this program would be like with the so called "minimum requirements".

I believe that before any new features are added to this great program (1.4.0pre+) that an effort needs to be made to make the current version more stable and system friendly. Who cares if you can zoom in so close to the Earth that you can count the bricks in your house if the program crashes all the time.

I am not a programmer and understand the, "if you can't do it yourself then don't cry me a river" attitude. But I would think the developers would want to put out the best program possible, and I think the only way to accomplish that is to take a step back from advancing the program and take some time to fix the memory issues that currently exist. There aren't any programs that I know of that require thousands of dollars in upgrades, and would still run slow and/or unstable. There has to be a way to manage memory better by preloading textures, dumping and freeing memory blocks that aren't in use, etc.

I do want to thank the developers for this program. I only wish that it were as enjoyable as it could be. Its fun to fly around and experience the universe in a 3D, photorealistic environment. With the memory issues this just isn't possible even on higher end systems.

Usability is in the mind of the beholder

Celestia itself can run in very small systems.
It's the Addons that need all the resources.

Unfortunately, the authors of some of the larger addons also have relatively large systems and don't realize until after they've made them available that their creations cause problems for smaller systems.

I find Celestia quite usable on my system, which I'm sure most people would consider pathetic by today's standards. However, I keep its limitations in mind when I decide what I'm going to use Celestia to look at.


System:
256MB ECC memory, 2x 500MHz Pentium 3; WinXP Pro SP2
128MB 250MHz Nvidia FX5700LE, ForceWare v66.93
Celestia v1.4.0pre6

p.s. added slightly later:
I do not have the instability problems that you seem to be experiencing. Is there any chance you're overclocking anything? That often can be a cause of intermittant problems. So can overheating and marginal memory. That's why I chose not to overclock, have a chassis with many fans, and use ECC memory.

Thanks for the reply. I'm not overclocking anything (wouldn't even know how). I have a Compaq Presario with the hardware mentioned above. My system should perform better than your system (except for the graphic card), yet it does not. Maybe if I throw a Geforce 6800 with 256MB that will solve my problems. Or maybe it is a problem with Athlon XP processors....any other Athlon users experience these problems when they shouldn't?

This is one of the coolest programs I have seen to date and would like to get this working smoothly for myself and for other users out there. Thanks to you as well Selden for your helpful web pages devoted to educating Celestia users. I just downloaded v1.4.0pre6 and will give it a whirl on my shaky system without any addons.