Please take 5 minutes to benchmark your machine...

[Chuft-Captain]

My machine is long overdue an upgrade, so I'm considering building a new desktop.
I want to ensure it will handle Celestia to my expectations, so I'm interested in what sort of performance different configurations experience in a standard situation. For this I've chosen an addon which performs very badly on my > 5 year old machine. This is the LEXX addon which seems to have a fairly high poly count..

If you have this addon, I would appreciate it if you would use it to measure your FPS on whatever hardware you have.
Use this URL: cel://Follow/Agena:Lexx/2012-02-24T12:31:54.60792?x=e/XaHehi/f///////////w&y=OVO4oOAZAQ&z=7CYsXPn8AQ&ow=0.85237&ox=0.0542533&oy=0.458306&oz=0.245923&select=Agena:Lexx&fov=25.6378&ts=1&ltd=0&p=0&rf=84375&lm=34816&tsrc=0&ver=3
You can get the addon here: http://celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/show_addon_details.php?addon_id=858 if you don't have it.

Don't forget that it usually takes Celestia's FPS display at least a few seconds to settle down to a stable number when changing scenes.

Please give the following details:
Frames per second, and the following details about your machine...
1. Graphics card (Model / VRAM / any over-clocking)
2. amount of RAM
3. Processor / Speed
4. Screen Resolution
5. Type and/or speed of disk (eg. SSD, SATA1,2,3, PATA, IDE)
6. OS
EDIT: Please also state what your anti-aliasing settings are set to. (eg anti-aliasing ON, 8x over-sampling.)

FYI, on my current (really ancient) machine, viewing the model from that URL gives me < 2 FPS :
1. Intel 82845G integrated graphics
2. 256MB RAM
3. 2.4 Ghz
4. 1280 x 1024
5. some sort of IDE drive (prob. 5400 rpm)
6. WinXP

FWIW, the config I'm considering for the new build is:

1. Nvidia 560Ti Overclock, or Nvidia 560Ti Super Overclock
2. 8GB of 1600Mhz
3. Intel i7 2600K
4. Hoping to run at 2560 x 1440, but almost impossible to find decent (or any) monitors of that resolution here. (Most monitors here are dumbed down to 1080p)
5. SSD drive to hold the OS, Programs, and frequently used textures
6. Win7 64bit professional

Mobo... either:

Asus P8Z68-V-PRO,
Asus P8Z68-V-LX,
Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD4, or
Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3

If you have direct experience with any of this gear (esp. the mobos), your comments would also be appreciated.

Looking forward to your benchmark results / comments...

Cheers
CC

[selden]

I get 27.8 fps using your URL.
The new system you describe should get better than 60 fps.

My system:
Dell Latitude E6510 laptop
CPU: 8GB, 1.6GHz, Core i7 Q720; Win7 Pro, SP1
Graphics: 512MB, Nvidia Quadro NVS 3100M (embedded); Forceware v270.61
Disk: 320GB, 7200RPM, 3Gb/sec SATA, Seagate Momentus ST9320423AS
Display: 1920x1080; Celestia r5186


p.s. I forgot that I had anti-aliasing enabled, with 8x oversampling. With it disabled, I get 83 fps when vertical sync is disabled.

i.e. just about any modern system will be more than adequate.

[t00fri]

CC,

you still have'nt replied whether you are now able to login to CelestialMatters

F.

[abramson]

Please give the following details:

I am at home with a notebook. Will check on tuesday with my i7 desktop at my lab (Monday is holiday...)

Notebook Dell Studio XPS 1340
Celestia 1.6.1 just with the Lexx add-on added.
Frames per second: 48 in maximized window, 58 in full screen

1. Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce 9400M G, 1904 MB Texture memory (?), 256 MB DDR2 GPU memory, 350 MHz GPU clock
2. amount of RAM: 4GB DDR3
3. Processor / Speed: Core 2 Duo P7350, 2 GHz
4. Screen Resolution: 1280x800
5. Type and/or speed of disk (eg. SSD, SATA1,2,3, PATA, IDE) Toshiba SCSI 320 GB
6. OS: Windows 7 Home Premium x64
7. Mainboard: Dell unspecified
8. NVIDIA relevant settings: antialiasing ON, Application controlled

EDIT: With Antialiasing 4x (overriding application control): 37fps and 45fps (max window and full screen)

[Chuft-Captain]

Thanks for the replies so far.
Those are pretty good performances given they are laptops.
I would actually prefer to get a laptop for the portability, but all the ones I've tried have struggled in the graphics department (even though they were i7 with the latest Intel 3000 graphics).

I wonder what might be a more challenging test... maybe Linuxman's high res ISS has more poly's than the Lexx model?
(Much as I wanted to, I have never downloaded his ISS because it would obviously kill my machine)
EDIT: Although the Lexx model has about 5 million polys, I don't think it has any textures, so it's really only testing one aspect of the typical performance issue. Still a useful benchmark though.

Fridger, no problems now with CM.

CC.

[t00fri]

Fridger, no problems now with CM.

CC.

Excellent, thanks CC.

So here is now my benchmark

Dell Latitude D620 / Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz / 4GB Ram. Graphics card: Quadro NVS 110M (an early ancestor of Selden's not very powerful NVS 3100M).

The NVS 110M is very similar to the GF 7300

Despite its age, I still get 27 fps in maximized Window mode, and 30 fps in fullscreen@1440x900
using your cel URL. OS is Win 7 Enterprise, 64bit. Celestia 1.6.1, no add-ons besides MilkyWay.

Fridger

PS: This LEXX addon is another example of a 100% Windows bias: for the LEXX author
lexx.3ds is the same as lexx.3DS
models is the same as Models

Correspondingly, Linux users will see no spaceship or whatever this LEXX monster is supposed to be
After fixing these bugs, LEXX shows up also under Linux.

[Chuft-Captain]

p.s. I forgot that I had anti-aliasing enabled, with 8x oversampling. With it disabled, I get 83 fps when vertical sync is disabled.

Actually, that's a good point Selden. These settings have a big impact on performance, so probably should be specified as part of the benchmark. I'll edit my original post to include this.
(I think AA enabled and 4x oversampling would be a reasonable compromise.)

[selden]

all the ones I've tried have struggled in the graphics department (even though they were i7 with the latest Intel 3000 graphics).

Unfortunately, Intel's graphics hardware is inadequate if you need good 3D support. You'll need to look at the higher end laptop models which include Nvidia or AMD/ATI graphics hardware.

[abramson]

(I think AA enabled and 4x oversampling would be a reasonable compromise.)

I rerun with those settings and edited my report. (Had to rescue the monster from the recycler...)

[Chuft-Captain]

all the ones I've tried have struggled in the graphics department (even though they were i7 with the latest Intel 3000 graphics).

Unfortunately, Intel's graphics hardware is inadequate if you need good 3D support. You'll need to look at the higher end laptop models which include Nvidia or AMD/ATI graphics hardware.

I have looked at laptops using Nvidia 540M (cost in the region of $US 1500). I can still grind them to a halt (~ 2-5 FPS) when displaying the entire O'Neill colony. The other problem that laptops always seem to have is sudden pauses while loading textures as new scenes come into view. I put this down to inadequacies or compromises made in the laptop architecture or components somewhere between HD and VRAM which compromises the efficient transfer of textures into memory.

Also, all available benchmarks / reviews on-line unsurprisingly focus on DirectX performance, rather that openGL performance.

[Chuft-Captain]

I rerun with those settings and edited my report. (Had to rescue the monster from the recycler...)

Thanks Guillermo, interesting to see the impact on FPS from those changes. Quite significant really.

Thanks for the replies so far.

Signing off for now...
CC

[selden]

System configuration at work:

Lenovo ThinkStation E20 4220-85U
CPU: 4GB, 3.2GHz, i5-650; Win 7 Enterprise SP1 x64
Graphics: 512MB, Nvidia Quadro FX 580; ForceWare v276.42
Disk: 500GB, 7200 RPM. 3Gb/sec SATA, HITACHI HDS721050CLA362
Display: 1920x1200; Celestia v1.6.1

LEXX performance:
4x antialiasing: 65 fps
no antialiasing: 145 fps

Of course, this particular configuration probably isn't what you want.
FWIW, I've found it to be comparable to my personal laptop in many ways. For some things it's faster, for others it's slower.

Another thing you might want to take into account is maintainability. A pre-packaged system with a 3 year warranty can yield a lot of peace of mind, since you won't have to suddenly come up with the money to fix it when it fails. FWIW, Lenovo's business-class desktop systems seem to be more reliable than the equivalents from either HP or Dell. I have no personal experience with the consumer-class systems of any of them. (Note that my personal laptop is a business-class system.)

When evaluating performance, you need to try to determine where the bottleneck is for the kinds of Addons you work with the most -- cpu or gpu. GPUCapsViewer can give you an idea of what fraction of the GPU capacity is in use, both performance and memory. It knows about most Intel, Nvidia and AMD graphics devices.

Performance for complex models and rendering features tends to be limited by graphics hardware performance.
Performance for large numbers of models tends to be limited by single-CPU performance, since Celestia has to determine where each one is and if it's visible.
Performance for texture loading tends to be disk I/O limited. However, if you have many textures, DDS tends to be the best format to use, rather than JPEG or PNG, since it loads directly into the graphics hardware with no format conversion.

p.s. another performance problem can be caused by how real-time scanning is handled by your anti-virus software. If your AV software looks at every disk file every time it's loaded, that can slow things significantly.

p.p.s. all of my timings were done with Celestia running full-screen.

[John Van Vliet]

--- edit ---

[t00fri]

well i am looking at the 2008 add on
1) it is not Linux and mac compliant
-- it needs fixing --
LEXX/Modles/lexx.3DS needs changing to LEXX/modles/lexx.3ds
the M to a m and 3DS to 3ds
...

See my earlier post above
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=16812&start=5

PS: This LEXX addon is another example of a 100% Windows bias: for the LEXX author
lexx.3ds is the same as lexx.3DS
models is the same as Models

Correspondingly, Linux users will see no spaceship or whatever this LEXX monster is supposed to be
After fixing these bugs, LEXX shows up also under Linux.

Fridger

[Marco Klunder]

Here my benchmark...
1. Graphics card: see footer
2. amount of RAM: see footer
3. Processor / Spee : see footer
4. Screen Resolution: 1280 x 1024 (advised)
5. Type and/or speed of disk: IDE ATA ???
6. OS: see footer
7. Anti-aliasing: ON

Windows prestation index: 4,4 (lowest score on graphic games)

Measured FPS: 3 - 17, mainly around 7

Hearing about FPS 60 ab higher, I think it's about time to talk to my wife

Marco

[Chuft-Captain]

I've done a quick plot of the FPS reported so far compared with the Passmark G3D scores (http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/) for the graphics card details provided by you guys.
Although there is not enough data so far to draw any firm conclusions, there does appear to be a close relationship between a cards Passmark score and its Celestia performance. (at least with this model which is all polygons).

lexx02.jpg

Extending the trendlines over to the GTX 560Ti's Passmark score of just under 3000, suggests ~ 100fps and slightly above 200 fps might be achieved for AA-4x and AA-Off respectively.

It will be interesting to see if this relationship holds true as more data arrives, but so far the Passmark score seems to be a good predictor of Celestia performance.

CC

PS. Updated with Marco's result. (I've put you in the 16x AA category Marco, as you didn't specify).

[selden]

The ssc has other problems: it specifies empty surface and night texture images. On my system that causes the OpenGL2 render path to draw the spaceship entirely white. Removing them lets it be drawn properly.

FWIW, converting the model to CMOD increases the fps substantially, of course.

[danielj]

This thing almost broke my video driver.

[Boux]

Quick and dirty benchmarking:
- Vista 64 (too lazy to reboot to Win7)
- 1920x1080
- no AA --> 112 fps
- x8 MS --> 106 fps
As expected, I am clearly CPU limited on this old machine.
I have yet to see an application (read: a game) which would be able to saturate this xFire set-up though...
Specs are in the sig.
I guess I have soon to build a new machine with latest hexacore, 16 Gigs ram and a pair of latest Radeons...

[Chuft-Captain]

Hi Boux,

Not sure if your setup is represented in the Passmark benchmarks.
The website:http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html
lists the following (in decreasing order of performance):

Radeon HD 4870
Radeon HD4870 X2
Radeon HD 4870 X2
ASUS EAH4870x2
Mobility Radeon HD 4870 X2
Mobility Radeon HD 4870

I don't know which of these (if any) is a close match to your setup.