can my display card work properly on virtual texture??

jcyf007 · Post #1by **jcyf007** » 02.01.2004, 00:47

can my display card work properly on virtual texture??
IntelPentium4 1500Mnz,384MBSD RAM,32MBTNT2M64 PCI display card.

TERRIER · Post #2by **TERRIER** » 02.01.2004, 01:53

Hello jcyf007

Can't say if your system is capable, but you can always give it a try.

Firstly you'll need to be running the latest version of Celestia; 1.3.1 FINAL.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to try out a relatively small VT, say Jens' 8k DDS Moon, available at;

http://home.arcor.de/jimpage/earth.html

regards
TERRIER

Don. Edwards · Post #3by **Don. Edwards** » 02.01.2004, 06:31

jcyf007,
Your TNTM64 will be able to use and render some of Celestia's most basic functions. I believe you can possibly use a .DSS texture, bumpmaps might work, clouds can be rendered and move, but I do not think you will have any spec lighting effects. Your card is pre-TL engine so many of the higher end effects are not going to be there. But the good news is that with 64MB of VRAM you will be able to use some of the larger textures that are around.
If you want to see Celestia in its full potential you will need to move up to a GeForce level card. Even a GeForce with 32MB will out-render your TNTM64.
If you can look around for a cheap used card. You can pick one up for as little as $25 if you now where to look. Try checking with small mom and pop computer repair shops. I have worked for one for over 2 years and we get GeForce cads in for trade or sale all the time.
The main thing is if you do decide to upgrade your video card make sure you stick with an NVidia based card if you want to have 100% compatibility with Celestia.

Don. Edwards

Mikeydude750 · Post #4by **Mikeydude750** » 02.01.2004, 06:37

Kind of stinks about graphics cards, too. ATI's cards are also more than capable of the stuff in Celestia, but the way Chris does it is nVidia-exclusive.

Anyone out there with an ATI card and programming experience, it would be nice if you could get us ATI owners set up with the nice effects as well. I would do it, but seeing as how I'm not very experienced in the field of programming (yet), I can't...

Post #5by **selden** » 02.01.2004, 07:10

Mikey,

Apparently all but one of the "eye candy" features in Celestia use device independant OpenGL features, including the OpenGL v1.4 vertex shaders. It isn't Chris' fault that ATI is providing debugged OpenGL drivers only for their model 9500 cards and above. Or that the other vendors can't be bothered to provide OpenGL v1.4.

My understanding is that the only feature in Celestia v1.3.1 that works only on Nvidia cards is haze, and, to be honest, it really doesn't contribute a lot to the visual effects.

While Celestia does still include two Nvidia-only rendering paths, it works fine (even on Nvidia cards) when they're not used. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if they disappear in a future release.

Don. Edwards · Post #6by **Don. Edwards** » 02.01.2004, 07:20

Mikeydude750,
As it has been said before if you want 100% ATI Radeon compliance from Celestia than just buy Chris an ATI Radeon and he can start to work on it. Or send him the money and he can pick it up himself. :wink:

Chris kind of works for NVidia so you can see why it was NVidia's card that got all the support from the beginning. I feel for you. You made your choice for a video card for all the performance that it can give you in some of the biggest game titles. But in the end was it worth it when you loose compliance with Celestia. Most of the features that the ATI cards have the NVidia cards can do but at the loss of a few frames per second. Really that is all that separates these cards. I have read article after article and the only reason to go with the ATI is for raw frame rate bliss. When you really look at the way things stand you have to consider what you want the card for. If you are a real big game player than of course you are going to get steered to the ATI cards. But if your time with the cards is split 50/50 between games and Celestia than an NVidia card is the better choice. There isn't any game out that an NVidia card can't play at a decent frame rate. And that isn't going to change. Does anyone honestly believe that games like Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 are not going to work or be playable on an NVidia card? If that was what you were told or that is what you think than you are wrong, dead wrong. As long as the cards are clocked fast enough and are fully Direct X 9 compliant than almost any higher end video card even S3's Delta Chrome and XGI's Volare cards are going to be able to play those games. Heck even my venerable NVidia GeForce4 Ti 4600 will play these games at the expense of what? A few dynamic shadows and a few neat lighting tricks and maybe a slightly slower frame rate. Really any frame rate above 60 is pure icing on the cake. As long as your card can do 60 fps you’re in a very good place.
Well those are my words on this.

Don. Edwards

jim · Post #7by **jim** » 02.01.2004, 14:26

Hi jcyf007,

As far as I know following things will not work on a TNT2 card:
- DDS textures (dxt texture compression is not supported)
- bumpmaps / normalmaps
- specular maps
- atmospheric haze

That means:
- all textures must be JPG or PNG format (use e.g. Irfanview to transform from DDS to JPG)
- virtual textures can be used but only JPG or PNG
- no texture compression means Celestia will work slow even with virtual textures

To see all the "eye candy" features in Celestia I recommend to buy a cheap second hand Geforce3 or a GF4 (please no GF4mx).

Bye Jens

P.S. My old grafic card was a tnt2 m64 and I run Celestia still on a tnt1 (16mb) card.

Mikeydude750 · Post #8by **Mikeydude750** » 02.01.2004, 17:55

Don. Edwards wrote:Mikeydude750,
As it has been said before if you want 100% ATI Radeon compliance from Celestia than just buy Chris an ATI Radeon and he can start to work on it. Or send him the money and he can pick it up himself.
Chris kind of works for NVidia so you can see why it was NVidia's card that got all the support from the beginning. I feel for you. You made your choice for a video card for all the performance that it can give you in some of the biggest game titles. But in the end was it worth it when you loose compliance with Celestia. Most of the features that the ATI cards have the NVidia cards can do but at the loss of a few frames per second. Really that is all that separates these cards. I have read article after article and the only reason to go with the ATI is for raw frame rate bliss. When you really look at the way things stand you have to consider what you want the card for. If you are a real big game player than of course you are going to get steered to the ATI cards. But if your time with the cards is split 50/50 between games and Celestia than an NVidia card is the better choice. There isn't any game out that an NVidia card can't play at a decent frame rate. And that isn't going to change. Does anyone honestly believe that games like Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 are not going to work or be playable on an NVidia card? If that was what you were told or that is what you think than you are wrong, dead wrong. As long as the cards are clocked fast enough and are fully Direct X 9 compliant than almost any higher end video card even S3's Delta Chrome and XGI's Volare cards are going to be able to play those games. Heck even my venerable NVidia GeForce4 Ti 4600 will play these games at the expense of what? A few dynamic shadows and a few neat lighting tricks and maybe a slightly slower frame rate. Really any frame rate above 60 is pure icing on the cake. As long as your card can do 60 fps you’re in a very good place.
Well those are my words on this.

Don. Edwards

That's not what I was getting at all. At no point did I intend to say that nVidia's cards were somehow less capable. Yes, ATI's cards do have less OGL capability than nVidia's(thanks to the drivers), but that is slowly changing(after each driver release, I am getting slightly better performance and compatibility in Celestia and other OGL apps).