Celestia Forums

Hello!

I have just bought a new computer with a built-in VIA/Unichrome S3 Graphics component and suddenly all galaxies has a... Well, strange appearence. All other things in Celestia are working beautifully though.

With my old computer (which had an ancient Cirrus logic 5436 Graphic??s card) Celestia was slow but fully functional. With my new computer (and the most recent drivers from the manufacturer) all the Galaxies seems to be made by rectangels.

See these screenshots of our friend M31.

http://img360.imageshack.us/my.php?image=m3110mn.jpg
http://img360.imageshack.us/my.php?image=m3128ui.jpg
http://img251.imageshack.us/my.php?image=m3139mn.jpg


This occurs in both the Basic- and the Multitexture render paths (the only two available for this graphic??s-component). I have uninstalled an reinstalled both the drivers and Celestia itself but the problem seems to remain. Either it didn??t help to install the "Celestia-1.4.0pre-FT1"-package. The problem is there both with the "Original" 1.4.0 pre 6 and the one including the new galaxy code.


My Open GL-Info:

Vendor: S3 Graphics

Renderer: VIA/S3G UniChrome IGP/MMX/SSE

Version: 1.2

Max simultaneous textures: 2

Max texture size: 1024



Supported Extensions:

GL_ARB_point_parameters

GL_ARB_multitexture

GL_EXT_blend_color

GL_EXT_blend_minmax

GL_EXT_blend_subtract

GL_ARB_texture_env_combine

GL_EXT_texture_env_combine

GL_ARB_texture_env_dot3

GL_EXT_texture_env_dot3

GL_ARB_texture_env_add

GL_EXT_texture_env_add

GL_EXT_secondary_color

GL_EXT_texture_lod_bias

GL_ARB_texture_mirrored_repeat

GL_EXT_stencil_wrap

GL_EXT_fog_coord

GL_ARB_transpose_matrix

GL_EXT_separate_specular_color

GL_EXT_rescale_normal

GL_ARB_window_pos

GL_EXT_abgr

GL_EXT_bgra

GL_EXT_packed_pixels

GL_EXT_paletted_texture

GL_EXT_vertex_array

GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array

GL_WIN_swap_hint

GL_EXT_draw_range_elements

Apparently the Borg are re-engineering the universe!

I suspect it's an S3 graphics driver bug.
You should try to locate a more recent version of the drivers
(too often systems are shipped with out-of-date software)
and you should report the problem to the authors.

As a workaround, you might try disabling hardware acceleration entirely.
Then your system will use Microsoft's OpenGL software drivers.
They're rather slow but seem to have few bugs.

Yep, I was also thinking about the Borg, but then I though that it just couldn??t be that bad

Well, updating to the latest S3-drivers (from their website) didn??t solved the problem, but disabling hardware-acceleration did! It??s a little slower but it works! Now I'm just going to write a little letter to the tech-guys at S3 and hopefully they can put together a fix for it

Thanks!

Hehe nice one about the Borg!

"We are the Borg. Prepare to be assimilated. Resistance is futile."