Celestia Forums

I am planning to buy a new computer(to replace my current computer which lags even at minimal resolutions and color depths on Celestia). I plan on buying the Radeon 9800 Pro 256mb card.

What I need to know is this; Will this wonderfully powerful graphics card be less capable than a Geforce 4? I read that Celestia doesn't support bump mapping, spectral lighting, among other features with non-NVidia cards.

Is anything being done to fix this, because a card with 256mb of VRAM would certainly be very nice for Celestia. I seriously don't want to buy a 128mb card, as 256 will hold the best textures. Unfortunately, NVidia doesn't sell any 256 cards yet, and I need this 9800 Pro to run other stuff, like Unreal Tournament 2003(yes, I probably will use 3D programs other than Celestia, although not much ).

Well unless you plan on buying 2 of those video cards, one for yourself and for Chris Celestia's creator, you can forget about the bumpmaping and specular lighting effects. He has said many, many times that he can't work on getting those features funtioning on an ATI card without the video card itself.
It seems he is rather strapped for funds and being Celestia is a free open-source project there is no momey comming in to push ATI compatibilty forward. So thats were things sre for now. As for that 256mb video card. There are NO games that use 256mb of VRAM at this time. Not even the most advanced game in production DOOM III is going to require a 256mb video card. 128mb is more than enough for now. You can run 16k textures just fine with a NVidia GeForce4 ti 4600 128mb card. You might want to consider a GeForce FX video card instead of that ATI Radeon 9xxx. Celestia will work just great on it and it will be more than ready for DOOM III. Do a little more research and don't believe all the ATI hype going around right now. Alot of the features on the ATI card are not even being built into games right now are not going to be in any games in the near furture. 3D video cards are always are 2 generations ahead of whats comming down the pike from the game manufactures. This is simply a fact. Doom III is the only game right now in production that going to stress the video card market as it stands now. Enough said.
Don.

I see...

I'm just getting this card to stay 2 steps ahead. Last time I only bought what was currently used, I was left behind within a few months. Plus, I want to keep my frame rates above 100 FPS, even with the most demanding settings.

I want to make sure that doesn't happen this time.

One more thing; will the "unsupported" features still partially work if I get this card?

Mikey,

Celestia v1.3.0 includes replacements for most of the Nvidia-only shader routines, using OpenGL v1.4 shader routines. They're *supposed* to work with the ATI cards, assuming that ATI has implemented the appropriate support in their OpenGL library. Unfortunately, I haven't found any posts mentioning anyone testing Celestia v1.3 with Radeon 9700 cards. Thre is a thread discussing problems with v1.3 bumpmapping on 8500 and 9000 models. See http://63.224.48.65/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1867

As Don says, without a Radeon of his own, it's quite hard for Chris to debug these kinds of problems.

Celestia v1.3.0 prerelese 3 is currently available at http://63.224.48.65/celestia/files. Supposedly the final release will be availbale Real Soon Now.

Seeing as how the 8500 and 9000 are based on the r2xx series, those problems might not show up.

Anyways, thanks for the information. I hope this card lasts me a good year or longer.