Hello, I am new participant on the set, I am Spanish and I do not know how to spell the English.
My question is this:
It normal that the program use a 100 % of CPU?
My computer is the following:
AMD Athlon XP 2600, 2x512 Mb RAM DDR333, FX5600 - 128mb, I use a resolution of 1024x768 for the CELESTIA.
Thanks!!!
100% CPU use !
Redfish wrote:If you use celestia you can't use anything else. So it's just celestia or the rest. No bothering in trying anything else.
Huh? Is this caused by Windows, or is it a spesific of the Celestia Win version?
On a Powerbook, now, i?m running Celestia, Photoshop and VirtualPC simultaneously... While chattering away here. On 768Mb ram. Ok, the Cel framerate is not much to speak of at the moment, but... Anyway.
If this is true, i?ll *never* switch...
-rthorvald
Runar,
No, it's not really true. It's just that it isn't obvious how to tune WinXP's scheduler so it "does the right thing" automatically.
On single CPU systems, you usually have to reduce Celestia's priority in order to get good response for other programs while Celestia's running.
Win9x is another kettle of (rotten) fish, though, since it includes no scheduling tools at all.
No, it's not really true. It's just that it isn't obvious how to tune WinXP's scheduler so it "does the right thing" automatically.
On single CPU systems, you usually have to reduce Celestia's priority in order to get good response for other programs while Celestia's running.
Win9x is another kettle of (rotten) fish, though, since it includes no scheduling tools at all.
Selden
I have a hyperthreading processor and it reduces the load on the cpu to 50%. I used to have to close everything to load Celestia but now I generally have studio max 6 and adobe photoshop cs open both while running Celestia without a hitch in framerate...
I recommend a hyperthreadding processor when using Celestia...
I recommend a hyperthreadding processor when using Celestia...
I'm trying to teach the cavemen how to play scrabble, its uphill work. The only word they know is Uhh and they dont know how to spell it!
I have a program in usely p2p always, in addition to the antivirus/firewall Norton 2003.
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Don. Edwards
- Posts: 1510
- Joined: 07.09.2002
- Age: 59
- With us: 22 years 2 months
- Location: Albany, Oregon
Ok time for a tech to get involed here.
One of the main reasons Rassilons CPU is only showing 50% usage is because a P4 with HyperThreading is treated buy Windows 2000 and XP as 2 CPUs. Actualy it is treated as a regular CPU and a second virtual CPU. So Rass' system showing 50% usage means that one of the CPUs is being maxed out to 100%. In actuality this means his cpu is maxed at 100% but the HT technology is giving his some extra headroom. But it is an illusion so to speak. What hyperthreading does in its most basic form is simply divide the cpu clock cycles creating the second virtual CPU.
That way it can time share proceses by running one program in one CPU and another program in the virtual CPU. If Rass was to open his system property app in the control panel and have a look he will see that Windows is reporting 2 CPUs instead of the standard single CPU.
Now as for AMD. They took another direction and chose to go the 64bit route instead of adding any kind of HyperThreading. Not to say they won't do it in the future. But AMD is more interested in actualy putting muliple CPU cores into a single die. This means that in the future you may be able to buy an AMD CPU that has 2 physical CPUs in one procesor chip.
I have and AMD Athlon XP+2600 and I can run Celestia and several other apps in the background with my system not having any problems at all.
I really don't think your problem is the CPU but the amount and size of the textures you are using.
I have a perfect example of this.
I run Earth with a 16k DDS main texture, 16k DDS normalmap, 16k DDS specmap, 16k DDS nightside texture, and my 8k non-moving cloud texture. I also have all of Celestia's built in visual enhancments turned on. Outside of Celestia I have FSAA (full screen anti-alliasing) set to 4x and antistropic filtering set to 8x. All this on a GeForce FX 5900 with 128mb of VRAM. I get smooth framrates from Celestia with just and ocasional frame drop.
Now if I turn on my Cloudshadow feature and let the system run with this turned on for a little over 10 minute my system will shut down. This is due to the CPU being stressed to 100% usage the motherboard chipset thinks the CPU is over heating and kicks in its safety feature and shuts down the sytem to protect it. It is anoying but I can live with it. While this is not the problem that Algol27 is having I can say that I finaly have found a way to get Celestia to kill a computer. I think Algol27 main problem just might be to many textures and not enough video memory bandwidth. The FX 5600 only have a little over 10gigs of memory bandwidth. The FX 5900 series has over 23gigs memory bandwith. Trust me this does make a drastic diference. My old card was a GeForce4 TI 4600 with 128mb of vram and it to only had 10gigs of memory bandwidth. I couldn't run all textures I do now with that either. I would loose framrates and lock up the system mak8ing me hard-boot the system.
So in the end at this point Celestia will always take 100% of your CPU resources. Buying a Hyperthreaded CPU really will not make a difference.
Things I think you should consider are adding more RAM to your system. 512MB is truely not enough with todays graphic apps and games. You didn't mention what version of Windows you are using. If you are not using Windows 2000 Pro or XP I would consider upgrading. The Win 2000/XP kernels handle memory managment much better than any other version of Windows 9x/ME. Besides the Win9x/ME kernals can even use any memory over 512mb anyway unless they are patched with a free third party product.
Also I wolud go into your bios and make sure your AGP slots fastest setting is turned on and try altering some the AGP busses setting to see if this might speed things up. Anyone into Gaming and Celestia should spend a little time in the bois tweaking you setting to get the best possible performance.
Trust me you like the results if you get it right.
Hope this answeres some questions.
Don. Edwards
One of the main reasons Rassilons CPU is only showing 50% usage is because a P4 with HyperThreading is treated buy Windows 2000 and XP as 2 CPUs. Actualy it is treated as a regular CPU and a second virtual CPU. So Rass' system showing 50% usage means that one of the CPUs is being maxed out to 100%. In actuality this means his cpu is maxed at 100% but the HT technology is giving his some extra headroom. But it is an illusion so to speak. What hyperthreading does in its most basic form is simply divide the cpu clock cycles creating the second virtual CPU.
That way it can time share proceses by running one program in one CPU and another program in the virtual CPU. If Rass was to open his system property app in the control panel and have a look he will see that Windows is reporting 2 CPUs instead of the standard single CPU.
Now as for AMD. They took another direction and chose to go the 64bit route instead of adding any kind of HyperThreading. Not to say they won't do it in the future. But AMD is more interested in actualy putting muliple CPU cores into a single die. This means that in the future you may be able to buy an AMD CPU that has 2 physical CPUs in one procesor chip.
I have and AMD Athlon XP+2600 and I can run Celestia and several other apps in the background with my system not having any problems at all.
I really don't think your problem is the CPU but the amount and size of the textures you are using.
I have a perfect example of this.
I run Earth with a 16k DDS main texture, 16k DDS normalmap, 16k DDS specmap, 16k DDS nightside texture, and my 8k non-moving cloud texture. I also have all of Celestia's built in visual enhancments turned on. Outside of Celestia I have FSAA (full screen anti-alliasing) set to 4x and antistropic filtering set to 8x. All this on a GeForce FX 5900 with 128mb of VRAM. I get smooth framrates from Celestia with just and ocasional frame drop.
Now if I turn on my Cloudshadow feature and let the system run with this turned on for a little over 10 minute my system will shut down. This is due to the CPU being stressed to 100% usage the motherboard chipset thinks the CPU is over heating and kicks in its safety feature and shuts down the sytem to protect it. It is anoying but I can live with it. While this is not the problem that Algol27 is having I can say that I finaly have found a way to get Celestia to kill a computer. I think Algol27 main problem just might be to many textures and not enough video memory bandwidth. The FX 5600 only have a little over 10gigs of memory bandwidth. The FX 5900 series has over 23gigs memory bandwith. Trust me this does make a drastic diference. My old card was a GeForce4 TI 4600 with 128mb of vram and it to only had 10gigs of memory bandwidth. I couldn't run all textures I do now with that either. I would loose framrates and lock up the system mak8ing me hard-boot the system.
So in the end at this point Celestia will always take 100% of your CPU resources. Buying a Hyperthreaded CPU really will not make a difference.
Things I think you should consider are adding more RAM to your system. 512MB is truely not enough with todays graphic apps and games. You didn't mention what version of Windows you are using. If you are not using Windows 2000 Pro or XP I would consider upgrading. The Win 2000/XP kernels handle memory managment much better than any other version of Windows 9x/ME. Besides the Win9x/ME kernals can even use any memory over 512mb anyway unless they are patched with a free third party product.
Also I wolud go into your bios and make sure your AGP slots fastest setting is turned on and try altering some the AGP busses setting to see if this might speed things up. Anyone into Gaming and Celestia should spend a little time in the bois tweaking you setting to get the best possible performance.
Trust me you like the results if you get it right.
Hope this answeres some questions.
Don. Edwards
I am officially a retired member.
I might answer a PM or a post if its relevant to something.
Ah, never say never!!
Past texture releases, Hmm let me think about it
Thanks for your understanding.
I might answer a PM or a post if its relevant to something.
Ah, never say never!!
Past texture releases, Hmm let me think about it
Thanks for your understanding.
Dear Don:
Thanks for the tips. I am going mad with Celestia lately, running horribly slow. I have a lot of nebula in my extras file and whenever Celestia draws the night sky, it has to draw 10 -15 nebula in the background first, before it even tries to draw a planet texture. Then, I have lots of spacecraft orbiting Earth (as an example), which Celestia also computes. I am also running your 16k Earth texture (I found VT textures to be even slower loading on my system).
Typically, as I view the ISS orbiting Earth, for example, and I move my orientation, my frame rates will drop to zero, the screen will freeze for at least 10 seconds, it may even turn white for a moment, my cpu clicks and churns, and finally the ISS resumes its movement. The effect is much worse when a distant nebula is also in the same view. I can't move the screen more than 60 degrees before everything freezes for up to 10 seconds.
I sure wish Celestia had an ability to toggle nebula on or off from within the program, without turning off galaxies (the Milky Way haze is great to always see in the background).
I can run perhaps one other app, but it just makes everything slower. If I try running two, I basically lock up the system. I have even had Windows message me on at least 5 occasions that my virtual memory is low and is being reset.
I have 512 MB of RAM with a P4, using a GeForce 4 TI 4200 with 128 MB video RAM. OP is Win XP Home Edition. I've tried resetting paging file memory to 2 GB, but it does not seem to have any effect. Maybe I did it wrong.
I am operating 30 p4 computers at my school for my students, with the new term only weeks away. They all have Nvidia FX 5200 cards with 64 MB RAM. Celestia 1.3.1 basically did OK with them, but now ....
Don, you could do me and lots of other folks a favor if you could summarize what you think would be a good tweak set for the BIOS, the virtual paging file and maybe the video card to get the most out of the hardware we have. What are those command lines you mentioned in your post? PLEASE
Thanks
Frank
Thanks for the tips. I am going mad with Celestia lately, running horribly slow. I have a lot of nebula in my extras file and whenever Celestia draws the night sky, it has to draw 10 -15 nebula in the background first, before it even tries to draw a planet texture. Then, I have lots of spacecraft orbiting Earth (as an example), which Celestia also computes. I am also running your 16k Earth texture (I found VT textures to be even slower loading on my system).
Typically, as I view the ISS orbiting Earth, for example, and I move my orientation, my frame rates will drop to zero, the screen will freeze for at least 10 seconds, it may even turn white for a moment, my cpu clicks and churns, and finally the ISS resumes its movement. The effect is much worse when a distant nebula is also in the same view. I can't move the screen more than 60 degrees before everything freezes for up to 10 seconds.
I sure wish Celestia had an ability to toggle nebula on or off from within the program, without turning off galaxies (the Milky Way haze is great to always see in the background).
I can run perhaps one other app, but it just makes everything slower. If I try running two, I basically lock up the system. I have even had Windows message me on at least 5 occasions that my virtual memory is low and is being reset.
I have 512 MB of RAM with a P4, using a GeForce 4 TI 4200 with 128 MB video RAM. OP is Win XP Home Edition. I've tried resetting paging file memory to 2 GB, but it does not seem to have any effect. Maybe I did it wrong.
I am operating 30 p4 computers at my school for my students, with the new term only weeks away. They all have Nvidia FX 5200 cards with 64 MB RAM. Celestia 1.3.1 basically did OK with them, but now ....
Don, you could do me and lots of other folks a favor if you could summarize what you think would be a good tweak set for the BIOS, the virtual paging file and maybe the video card to get the most out of the hardware we have. What are those command lines you mentioned in your post? PLEASE
Thanks
Frank
Frank,
Your system needs more main memory or fewer Addons.
The noises you describe as "clicks and churns" is your system frantically moving data back and forth between main memory and the paging file because all those addons make Celestia too big to fit. Making the paging file larger will allow larger programs to get started, but it won't help them to run faster.
Your system needs more main memory or fewer Addons.
The noises you describe as "clicks and churns" is your system frantically moving data back and forth between main memory and the paging file because all those addons make Celestia too big to fit. Making the paging file larger will allow larger programs to get started, but it won't help them to run faster.
Selden
Dear Selden:
OH!!! Damned!!!
Is the memory shortage you mentioned the 128 MB Video RAM on the card, or is it my 512 MB of regular RAM (which I thought would be large enough)?
Are there any computer settings I can change that you and Don have made reference to in the past, that will improve things for me and others like me, short of buying a new Ndvidia card or removing a lot of add-ons from the Extras file? Lots of us are experiencing slow performance.
For example, what are the BIOS optimization settings that Don referenced? Also, should I manually reset my paging file to 2 GB, or should I let Windows control it automatically?
Why do I get low virtual memory warmings with a 2 GB paging file? I thought Celestia simply released RAM when it was done with it. Does the warnings suggest that textures or models within RAM are being retained by the program, even after it moves on to draw another texture?
Any tweaking help you and/or DOn could offer would be much appreciated by a very frustrated
guy 
Frank
OH!!! Damned!!!
Is the memory shortage you mentioned the 128 MB Video RAM on the card, or is it my 512 MB of regular RAM (which I thought would be large enough)?
Are there any computer settings I can change that you and Don have made reference to in the past, that will improve things for me and others like me, short of buying a new Ndvidia card or removing a lot of add-ons from the Extras file? Lots of us are experiencing slow performance.
For example, what are the BIOS optimization settings that Don referenced? Also, should I manually reset my paging file to 2 GB, or should I let Windows control it automatically?
Why do I get low virtual memory warmings with a 2 GB paging file? I thought Celestia simply released RAM when it was done with it. Does the warnings suggest that textures or models within RAM are being retained by the program, even after it moves on to draw another texture?
Any tweaking help you and/or DOn could offer would be much appreciated by a very frustrated
guy
Frank
Paging to disk happens for whatever can't fit into main memory, not for graphics memory; at least not directly.fsgregs wrote:Dear Selden:
OH!!! Damned!!!
Is the memory shortage you mentioned the 128 MB Video RAM on the card, or is it my 512 MB of regular RAM (which I thought would be large enough)?
The most improvement will be seen if you buy more main memory.Are there any computer settings I can change that you and Don have made reference to in the past, that will improve things for me and others like me, short of buying a new Ndvidia card or removing a lot of add-ons from the Extras file? Lots of us are experiencing slow performance.
Sorry: I don't know the details of the BIOS adjustments. I've never tried to optimize them myself.For example, what are the BIOS optimization settings that Don referenced?
It's best to set a fixed paging file size and then do a disk-save-and-restore using a backup utility like Ghost. For best paging performance, you need a contiguous paging file, not one with pieces scattered all over the disk. When Windows "controls" the size, it allocates pieces at random locations on the disk when it finds it needs more space. Then the disk heads have to jump all around to find all those pieces. Windows just tries to make it possible for you to run lots of and/or large programs, it doesn't try to make them run fast.Also, should I manually reset my paging file to 2 GB, or should I let Windows control it automatically?
Why do I get low virtual memory warmings with a 2 GB paging file?
you must have a lot of Addons! Be sure you've shut down all the programs you really don't need to have running. Yes, that's what those warnings suggest. I think I recall Chris mentioning that Celestia does not (yet) release the buffers that it allocates when it reads in textures. Hopefully that improvement will be included in the next major release of Celestia after 1.3.2.I thought Celestia simply released RAM when it was done with it. Does the warnings suggest that textures or models within RAM are being retained by the program, even after it moves on to draw another texture?
Any tweaking help you and/or DOn could offer would be much appreciated by a very frustrated
Unfortunately, my personal solution has been to avoid loading Addons that I'm not currently working with.
You aren't likely to notice the performance improvements gained by the BIOS tweaks that Don mentioned until you eliminate the paging. Sorry.
You can get an idea of what's happening with main memory allocation by watching the "Performance" tab of the Task Manager. The graph in the lower half shows a plot of how much virtual memory is being used. When the PF Usage goes past the amount of physical memory in your system, you'll notice that performance takes a nosedive. Its peak value will tell you just how much main memory you really need. If a 2GB paging file is too small, then you need more than 2GB of main memory
You have my sympathy.
Selden
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Don. Edwards
- Posts: 1510
- Joined: 07.09.2002
- Age: 59
- With us: 22 years 2 months
- Location: Albany, Oregon
Hey Guys,
Well the problem with setting your bios is what will work on one system may not work well on another. That is why I said you have to play with settings and see if you get an improment. You have to take into consideration that there are 3 main bios manaufactures and each has a different style as to how they work. Even a bios from one manufacturer will have multiple versions with features turned on or off. I could do a basic write up but again if I base it on my system only those with Asus Nvidia nForce based Athlon systems will benifit from the write up.
Frank,
You seriously need to spend some money on more memory. I have a 1.5gigs and trust me it helps Celestia from having to cache as much to the page file. I know memeory prices have gone up in the last couple of months but keep any eye out either online or in the adds of local computer shops for sales. Another thing thing you can do is if your computer has multiple hard drives and they are rated at the same speed 5400rpm or 7200rpm you can move your page file to the other hard drive and this will speed windows access to the page file. This will however not do any good if you have a single hard drive that is partioned into 2 hard drives. The reason this works is will windows is reading from your main drive it is usualy free to access the second drive. This will give you just a little bit of a speed boost but every little bit helps. It also helps if the second drive is a fast 7200rpm or faster drive. If you really wanted to you could even put the page file on a raid setup and this would give yet another slight increase in speed to the page file. I have experitmented with a fee different scemes. Buy far the best choice is to set the page file up on a second hard drive. If you want to know how to do this I can give you instructions on how it is done.
BTW, Frank, You bought this great card for me. Why don't you treat yourself to an upgrade as well. I am sure you could buy a card just like mine for allot less than when you bought it for me if you look around. Trust me the extra memory bandwidth over what your ti 4200 has will be seen right away. Your ti 4200 only has about 8gigs of memory bandwidth versus mine at 23gigs. And letts not even get into the GeForce 6xxx series of cards. I haven't seen the specs but I think it is double of mine.
Ok enough babing for now. Back to work on my textures.
Don. Edwards
Well the problem with setting your bios is what will work on one system may not work well on another. That is why I said you have to play with settings and see if you get an improment. You have to take into consideration that there are 3 main bios manaufactures and each has a different style as to how they work. Even a bios from one manufacturer will have multiple versions with features turned on or off. I could do a basic write up but again if I base it on my system only those with Asus Nvidia nForce based Athlon systems will benifit from the write up.
Frank,
You seriously need to spend some money on more memory. I have a 1.5gigs and trust me it helps Celestia from having to cache as much to the page file. I know memeory prices have gone up in the last couple of months but keep any eye out either online or in the adds of local computer shops for sales. Another thing thing you can do is if your computer has multiple hard drives and they are rated at the same speed 5400rpm or 7200rpm you can move your page file to the other hard drive and this will speed windows access to the page file. This will however not do any good if you have a single hard drive that is partioned into 2 hard drives. The reason this works is will windows is reading from your main drive it is usualy free to access the second drive. This will give you just a little bit of a speed boost but every little bit helps. It also helps if the second drive is a fast 7200rpm or faster drive. If you really wanted to you could even put the page file on a raid setup and this would give yet another slight increase in speed to the page file. I have experitmented with a fee different scemes. Buy far the best choice is to set the page file up on a second hard drive. If you want to know how to do this I can give you instructions on how it is done.
BTW, Frank, You bought this great card for me. Why don't you treat yourself to an upgrade as well. I am sure you could buy a card just like mine for allot less than when you bought it for me if you look around. Trust me the extra memory bandwidth over what your ti 4200 has will be seen right away. Your ti 4200 only has about 8gigs of memory bandwidth versus mine at 23gigs. And letts not even get into the GeForce 6xxx series of cards. I haven't seen the specs but I think it is double of mine.
Ok enough babing for now. Back to work on my textures.
Don. Edwards
I am officially a retired member.
I might answer a PM or a post if its relevant to something.
Ah, never say never!!
Past texture releases, Hmm let me think about it
Thanks for your understanding.
I might answer a PM or a post if its relevant to something.
Ah, never say never!!
Past texture releases, Hmm let me think about it
Thanks for your understanding.
-
Redfish
- Posts: 185
- Joined: 22.05.2002
- With us: 22 years 5 months
- Location: Lat: 50.850 Long: 5.683 | Maastricht Netherlands
- Contact:
Well I can share my experience with frank's. I also installed ALL nebula add-ons. And even with a 2400+ with 1 GB of ram and a GF4 Ti 4600 it's soooo slow. But strange thing is, when I move all the stc files into a different folder the slow down still is there. And even when turning off stars it's kinda slow.
So i found out it's acutally my planets who are causing the slow down. When I turn these off it runs pretty well. But the strange thing is that's i have a lot of textures in the hires folder, but still i'm not even using those. H?ven't CTR R till that moment. So i'm really puzzled.
So i found out it's acutally my planets who are causing the slow down. When I turn these off it runs pretty well. But the strange thing is that's i have a lot of textures in the hires folder, but still i'm not even using those. H?ven't CTR R till that moment. So i'm really puzzled.
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skatebiker
- Posts: 1
- Joined: 26.11.2006
- With us: 17 years 11 months
When using Celestia 1.4.1 it on Windows XP SP2 uses 99% CPU time even when running in background. I opened the Task Manager and set the Priority of celestia.exe to 'low'. But the CPU usage remained 99%.
I think it is easy when running celestia to set the priority low or even freeze it automatically when switching to the background.
Klaas
I think it is easy when running celestia to set the priority low or even freeze it automatically when switching to the background.
Klaas
skatebiker,
That's because of the way Celestia is designed.
If it can't finish calculating the display before it's time to refresh the screen, it'll use 100% of the cpu trying to keep up. You can turn on its FPS display to see the current frame rate. Type an accent-grave (`) to display fps in the lower left corner of Celestia's window.
A future verion of Celestia might include a way to specify what fps you want it to limit itself to. At the moment, it tries to keep up with the screen refresh rate that you have specified for your computer, usually 75Hz.
Reducing its priority won't change that. Reduced priority causes a program to release the cpu to programs that have higher priority. If no other programs want to run, it'll still use all of the cpu.
If you iconize Celestia, it will stop using cpu cycles. (iconize=minimize = click on the "_" widget in the upper right corner of its window)
That's because of the way Celestia is designed.
If it can't finish calculating the display before it's time to refresh the screen, it'll use 100% of the cpu trying to keep up. You can turn on its FPS display to see the current frame rate. Type an accent-grave (`) to display fps in the lower left corner of Celestia's window.
A future verion of Celestia might include a way to specify what fps you want it to limit itself to. At the moment, it tries to keep up with the screen refresh rate that you have specified for your computer, usually 75Hz.
Reducing its priority won't change that. Reduced priority causes a program to release the cpu to programs that have higher priority. If no other programs want to run, it'll still use all of the cpu.
If you iconize Celestia, it will stop using cpu cycles. (iconize=minimize = click on the "_" widget in the upper right corner of its window)
Selden