ElPelado wrote:And what is the 8x or 4x you talked about???
These are settings for
antialiasing and
anisotropic filtering, which basically help your graphics card to improve the quality of the image displayed on your screen.
Antialising smooths the edges of an object, so for a good example of this working in Celestia will be that you notice a smoother and less jagged edge to your planets. The smoothness will improve using a higher setting, but it will cost you some of your performance (FPS) as it takes more processing power.
Anisotropic filtering is a way of improving the depth /3D effect of the image, (read more about it here, with this simple explanation);
http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition ... 37,00.html
Again the image will improve using a higher setting, but at a cost of performance.
Both these features are supported by ATI and Nvidea cards as far as I know, and the better the card, the more options you will have for each. My Nvidea card allows a range from 2x to 8x, using the latest nvidea 53.03 driver. Better cards maybe can go higher than 8x ?
You can access these settings 2 ways.
First by going via the
Control Panel /
Display /
Settings /
Advanced route.
Where you can click on the tab with the name of your graphics card to bring up its settings option menu. Where you can adjust the value you want using the sliders.
see below;
Or, If you have your nvidea settings icon displayed in your
taskbar, you can adjust the settings directly.
Here is a screenshot where I am adjusting my Antialiasing settings, see below;
And for Anisotropic Filtering, see below;
Hope this helps ?
TERRIER
PS
I don't use the settings at 8x when I normally run Celestia
1.6.0:AMDAth1.2GHz 1GbDDR266:Ge6200 256mbDDR250:WinXP-SP3:1280x1024x32FS:v196.21@AA4x:AF16x:IS=HQ:T.Buff=ON Earth16Kdds@15KkmArctic2000AD:FOV1:SPEC L5dds:NORM L5dxt5:CLOUD L5dds:
NIGHT L5dds:MOON L4dds:GALXY ON:MAG 15.2-SAP:TIME 1000x:RP=OGL2:10.3FPS