Celestia running VERY slow on a fast machine

[Neurotoxic]

I am running Celestia on a P4 1.4GHz with 1024mb RIMM and an nVidia GeForce 3 Ti200 128mb. My OS is Win XP SP1.

I thought Celestia was running very slowly when I first tried it, so I verified what driver was installed for my video card (it happened to be Microsoft's driver). Then I installed the latest driver from nVidia and things got worst. Actualy, I guesstimate my fps to 1. No shit. It also slows down every other app running at the same time. It is completely un-usable. It even takes a few seconds to render a single scene if I minimize/maximize Celestia...

This is the info I get from the help menu on the GL Driver:

Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Renderer: GeForce3/AGP/SSE2/forceSW
Version: 1.5.0
Max simultaneous textures: 4
Max texture size: 4096

So I understand that GL is enabled, right? Then what can cause my machine to become SO slow? I couldn't find anything relevant on the forums...

[selden]

Did you verify that the "hardware acceleration" slider is all the way to the right?

Do you have any Addons instralled?

How much virtual memory do you have allocated?
It should be ~3X your main memory: defrag your disk , enable "custom size" and set both initial and maximum to 3072; then reboot.
Do not use the default "system managed size".

Shut down all the other apps (what are they?).
Does that make any difference?

Added slightly later: and which version of Celestia are you running?

[Neurotoxic]

The hardware acceleration is enabled and at "Full".

I am using version 1.3.1-1 of Celestia, with no add-ons. I tried to uninstall/re-install it to no avail.

My HD does not need to be defragged yet -- it's only a few days-old windows installation. The paging file on my system cannot exceed 1536mb. Maximum was already set to 3072. "Default" option was not used.

Mozilla Firefox, ABC (a bittorrent client) and Putty (a terminal) were running. Closing them and having only crucial windows processes running does not help....

Weird, really.

[selden]

I was recommending defragging in order to make sure that the paging file allocation would be contiguous (or at most in two fragments).

Having a pagefile only slightly larger than main memory may or may not cause problems, but I wouldn't expect it to cause a slowdown like you report.

How big is your primary XP system partition?
Not being able to actually allocate the entire 3GB suggests that your primary partition is completely full. I don't know what problems that would cause.

The windows software installation procedures are far from optimal: after installing XP plus a few software packages, your disk will be badly frafmented. It's very annoying.

How fast do other OpenGL applications run?

fwiw, I just downloaded and ran "treemark"
from http://www.setiathomescreensaverspeed.co.uk/downloads/freeware/opengl/treemark.htm

I double-clicked on its "simple.bat" and it gave the following results on my rather slow sysem:

Code: Select all

frames per second: 67.9394
Screen Resolution 1024x768
Frame count is 1000
leaves: 1273
branches: 1272
polygons per frame: 35820


A second run gave 78FPS. It rattled the system disk heavily during the startup of the first run, so I'm guessing it was paging a lot of stuff out. It didn't do that the second time.


System:
256MB 500MHz P3, Win XP Pro SP1
128MB GF4 Ti4200 drivers v56.72

[Neurotoxic]

Well, considering the gravity of my problem (Celestia is unbelievably slow -- I think I actualy miss my Commodore 64), I did not think defragging would do any good. I tried anyway, and just as I expected, nothing changed. However, thanks to you, I realized how crappy Windows installs itself on a drive. It looks like they're using a "random" function to determine on which sector to write to. Anyway....

My drive is used solely for Windows. My apps are on another partition. My OS drive has 5gb total space, and 1gb is free. My APPS partition has about 7gb free, out of a total of 10. That's where Celestia is installed, but I don't think that free space is used anyway for that program.

I ran the benchmark you linked to. And I don't have any result to post. I've let the thing run for 5 minutes or so before I killed it. I'd estimate it to be running at 0.3 fps. I looked as if I was rendering a massive 3d animation on an old 486.

Something's obviously wrong with my video driver and/or my card. Or maybe something else? But I don't think the problem has anything to do with the paging fil or applications that were running -- it would've been WAY faster.

I'll google for that and post anything I find, eventhough it probably won't be Celestia-related. It's more of a driver problem.

[Neurotoxic]

Since I can't edit my post to correct my typo's and add a comment, here it goes:

Prior to my re-installing Windows, I ran a few 3d games on the exact same computer (Return to Castle Wolfenstein & Medal of Honor, among others) and everything was running perfectly smooth. So it most probably isn't hardware related. Maybe I got the wrong driver installed (how the hell did I do that?) or maybe some unknwon setting is messed up.....

[selden]

Of course, you should double check to make sure any cards haven't wiggled loose.

Hopefully you did your reinstall, including all of XP's security patches, while entirely offline or behind a firewall. If your system was connected directly to the internet before it was fully patched, then it has been hacked. Automated scans happen every few minutes. As a result, it could be running anything in the background. XP "root kits" modify the system software so that hackers' programs don't show up in the task manager.

[Neurotoxic]

Nah. Not hacked. I'm connected through a good Debian box, all the Windows updates have been completed correctly and I always use msconfig to verify what's running, not the task manager.

I should have some time later today to double-check if anything somehow got loose inside the computer.

[Seb]

Since your machine is very new, I suggest you download and install the latest Graphic drivers from the Manufactured website as this can make some difference compared to Windows default ones.