Radeon 9800 Pro and Celestia

[Cham]

I want to change my video card, because my NVidia GeForce4 MX (32 MB Vram) totally sucks.

Will Celestia be able to use vertex shaders, bump maps and all the special effects, if I put the ATI Radeon 9800 pro in my system ?

[selden]

Not reliably.

I'd suggest an Nvidia FX 5nnn series card. I noticed that the PNY version of the FX 5700 is now available at BestBuy for under $100 US.

Unfortunately most of Nvidia's model 68nn cards draw an ungodly amount of power, and the 66nn cards don't seem to be available yet.

As best I can tell from postings here and elsewhere, ATI does a very poor job of debugging their drivers. Their vertex program code (used by Celestia's new shaders) seems to have quite a few problems

ATI cards don't seem to be able to handle large distances, either. Several of my Quasar Addons, which go out to 13.7 e9 ly, can't be drawn by ATI cards. The radius has to be reduced to 1e5LY. They work fine on Nvidia cards.

[chris]

I thought it was mostly the older ATI cards that had problems, and that the 9500 and up worked considerably better. Cham, I believe that you'll be able to see bump mapping and specular lighting effects on a 9800, at least on Windows.

The GeForce 6800 cards aren't *that* bad for power usage, especially the plain old 6800 and the 6800GT--either of those will work if you have at least a 350 watt power supply. The GeForce 6600 is available right now, but only in a PCI Express version; I'm not sure when the AGP version will be ready.

--Chris

[Evil Dr Ganymede]

More importantly what sort of new card would support all the features that Chris is adding?

[selden]

Here's the official list from a posting Chris made to the developers' mailing list. The important thing is that the graphics driver must support GLSL ( OpenGL Shading Language).

GeForce FX 5200/5600/5700/5800/5900
GeForce 6200/6600/6800
Radeon 9500/9600/9700/9800
Radeon X700/X800

The latest chipset from 3dLabs also supports GLSL; otherwise, the chipsets from other vendors are a waste of money.

See the thread http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5817 for 'plaints from people having problems with the ATI drivers for Linux.

A person I trust was having lots of Addon problems with a 9700 under XP, both with distances (1e5 LY max) and texture sizes (2K max).

I don't recall any explicit comments on the Forum about Celestia limititations from people who have a 9800 (or newer). A quick search only found one comment about a 9800's problem with some other program.

[Kendrix]

I have a Radeon 9800 Pro and it works perfectly with Celestia !

ATI Drivers are no longer an issue since a lot of time now.

[Cham]

I have a Radeon 9800 Pro and it works perfectly with Celestia !

ATI Drivers are no longer an issue since a lot of time now.

Can you tell more ? Do you have bump maps ? Do you have full scene antialiasing ? Specular reflections ? Antialiasing is very important to me.

Do you have ANY problems with this card ?

[selden]

Kendrix,

I'd greatly appreciate it if you'd provide some more information so I can add it to the FAQ.

Which operating system are you running?
Windows, MacOS or Linux? Which version?
What version of drivers are you using?

What is its maximum texture size?
Please post the output of Celestia's menu Help/ OpenGL Info. (You can copy-and-paste it.)

What happens when you view the Addon http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/%20iras-pscz.zip? Or any of my other high-redshift catalogs?

Do the points flicker and appear and disappear as you change viewpoints, or are they all rock-stable?

Thanks!

[Veleno]

I all,
I have an old ATI 9000 card but i can see bump, specular, ecc..
With latest cards, what can i see?
Could someone post some screenshots with best/new features?
Thanks!

[selden]

Veleno,

Please answer the questions that I asked Kendrix.

[Evil Dr Ganymede]

So one of these should be fine?

Asus V9570LE FX5700LE 128M DDR AGP8X TV-Out DVI

I can't really see much difference between that and the V9570 that isn't LE, but the latter is more expensive...

It says it only supported Open GL 1.5, I thought chris said something about using features only supported by Open GL 2.0? Or was that something to come later on?

[Cham]

Is anyone here using Celestia on a Mac, with an ATI card ? If so, can you please describe all the problems you were experiencing in Celestia, related to the video card ? Also, please state the exact video card you have with vram amount, etc.

I'm about to change my video card on my Mac, expressly for Celestia (and some games), so I need to be sure of the right choice (I don't have many) !

[selden]

All of the Nvidia FX 5700 cards have the same functionality.

Usually it's the speed and memory capacity that differ. Specifically, the graphics engine of Asus' LE version runs at about half the speed of the non-LE 5700, its internal memory bus is half as wide (64 bits vs 128bits), and it has 128MB instead of 256MB of memory.

Many, but not all, of the features defined for OpenGL v2.0 are available in Nvidia's v1.5 libraries. The new shader programming language is one of the functions that's included and that Celestia will be using.

[Evil Dr Ganymede]

All of the Nvidia FX 5700 cards have the same functionality.

Usually it's the speed and memory capacity that differ. Specifically, the graphics engine of Asus' LE version runs at about half the speed of the non-LE 5700, its internal memory bus is half as wide (64 bits vs 128bits), and it has 128MB instead of 256MB of memory.

Hrm. The link from the Asus graphics card page claimed that the second link I posted was a 128MB card but it wasn't. But the computer parts shop near me has the 128MB version and the LE 128MB version. Guess I'm better off getting the non-LE one though.

[Cham]

What about the ATI Radeon 9000 pro, with 128 MB Vram ? I can afford one for a very descent price. Is it compatible with Celestia ?

[selden]

Cham,

According to Chris, you should not consider anything less than an Nvidia FX5200 or ATI 9500 if you want to be able to see all of the future "eye candy" -- shadows cast by multiple light sources, in particular.

See the thread List of features for next release of Celestia

[Cham]

Thanks Selden.

I think I'll go for ATI 9800 pro then.

[Evil Dr Ganymede]

Apparently it's not worth getting a Geforce 5xxx card now since the 6xxx are on the way. So I'm gonna wait for the 6600 to trickle down to here and grab that.

[Kendrix]

Selden :

I have Windows XP SP1 with a P4 HT 2.8 GHz and 1 Go DDR PC3200.
Using ATI Catalyst 4.9.

Here is the OpenGL Info from Celestia :
Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
Renderer: RADEON 9800 Pro x86/SSE2
Version: 1.5.4582 WinXP Release
Max simultaneous textures: 8
Max texture size: 2048

Supported Extensions:
GL_ARB_multitexture
GL_EXT_texture_env_add
GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array
GL_S3_s3tc
GL_ARB_depth_texture
GL_ARB_fragment_program
GL_ARB_fragment_program_shadow
GL_ARB_fragment_shader
GL_ARB_multisample
GL_ARB_occlusion_query
GL_ARB_point_parameters
GL_ARB_shader_objects
GL_ARB_shading_language_100
GL_ARB_shadow
GL_ARB_shadow_ambient
GL_ARB_texture_border_clamp
GL_ARB_texture_compression
GL_ARB_texture_cube_map
GL_ARB_texture_env_add
GL_ARB_texture_env_combine
GL_ARB_texture_env_crossbar
GL_ARB_texture_env_dot3
GL_ARB_texture_mirrored_repeat
GL_ARB_transpose_matrix
GL_ARB_vertex_blend
GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object
GL_ARB_vertex_program
GL_ARB_vertex_shader
GL_ARB_window_pos
GL_ATI_draw_buffers
GL_ATI_element_array
GL_ATI_envmap_bumpmap
GL_ATI_fragment_shader
GL_ATI_map_object_buffer
GL_ATI_separate_stencil
GL_ATI_texture_env_combine3
GL_ATI_texture_float
GL_ATI_texture_mirror_once
GL_ATI_vertex_array_object
GL_ATI_vertex_attrib_array_object
GL_ATI_vertex_streams
GL_ATIX_texture_env_combine3
GL_ATIX_texture_env_route
GL_ATIX_vertex_shader_output_point_size
GL_EXT_abgr
GL_EXT_bgra
GL_EXT_blend_color
GL_EXT_blend_func_separate
GL_EXT_blend_minmax
GL_EXT_blend_subtract
GL_EXT_clip_volume_hint
GL_EXT_draw_range_elements
GL_EXT_fog_coord
GL_EXT_multi_draw_arrays
GL_EXT_packed_pixels
GL_EXT_point_parameters
GL_EXT_rescale_normal
GL_EXT_secondary_color
GL_EXT_separate_specular_color
GL_EXT_shadow_funcs
GL_EXT_stencil_wrap
GL_EXT_texgen_reflection
GL_EXT_texture3D
GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc
GL_EXT_texture_cube_map
GL_EXT_texture_edge_clamp
GL_EXT_texture_env_combine
GL_EXT_texture_env_dot3
GL_EXT_texture_filter_anisotropic
GL_EXT_texture_lod_bias
GL_EXT_texture_mirror_clamp
GL_EXT_texture_object
GL_EXT_texture_rectangle
GL_EXT_vertex_array
GL_EXT_vertex_shader
GL_HP_occlusion_test
GL_NV_texgen_reflection
GL_NV_blend_square
GL_NV_occlusion_query
GL_ARB_point_sprite
GL_SGI_color_matrix
GL_SGIS_texture_edge_clamp
GL_SGIS_texture_border_clamp
GL_SGIS_texture_lod
GL_SGIS_generate_mipmap
GL_SGIS_multitexture
GL_SUN_multi_draw_arrays
GL_WIN_swap_hint
WGL_EXT_extensions_string
WGL_EXT_swap_control

And I got the flickering problem you told with your addon.
It's the first time something goes wrong in my Celestia ;o)

[selden]

Kendrix,

Thanks!



So, although Celestia's new shadow code should work fine on a 9800 (GL_ARB_shading_language_100 ), there are limitations in the kinds of Addons it can draw.

In particular, textures on models must be less than 2K on a side (Max texture size: 2048), and distances must be kept under 1e5 LY (flickering points).

I seem to recall that Chris mentioned that he hoped to be able to do something about the distance limit in a future version of Celestia. One can hope!