Celestia Earth Question

[Dnumdé]

Hello!

Yesterday I just put in a 16meg video card that I found (upgrading from 4 megs) and with it I found out that Celestia (1.2.4) is a lot easier to use. It isn't so choppy. Except for one thing.

Earth is very choppy. The computer slows dramatically when I approach Earth. I changed the PNG file to a JPG, and compressed that to around 300kb, which is less than the Moon's texture's size, and I disabled clouds and nightlights, and still it is extremely slow. Is there something I am missing? Everything else works just fine. It is only when I approach Earth does that happen.

[D.Edwards]

Well as usual its hard for us to dianose your problem without even knowing what video chipset you have on your card. I have been able to get Celestia to work OK with a 16MB TNT2 video card but I had to use small textures of 512x256 to get it to work with any speed. A 32MB video card is almost manditory as far as I am conserned and a video card with an NVidia chipset is by far the least problamatic of all the the cards. ATI cards work well enough though for some. I hope your not using any 3Dfx based card. That will give you trouble from the get go. So will S3 Virge cards. The list could go on and on and on. The main thing you need to find out is does your video card support hardware or software OpenGL. If it supports only software OpenGL than your outa luck. Software OpenGL makes your computers CPU do most of the work so you are not going to get any kind of speed even with a powerfull CPU. If your card supports hardware OpenGL than its time to hit your cards manufactures web site and get the newest drivers and check for an OpenGL IDC. This is the driver that enables your card to operate OpenGL in Hardware mode.This is the same kind of trouble people had when the OpenGL version of the originl Quake came out. Ever video card manufacturer had there own OpenGL IDC. It may be time for you to start saveing some money for a more modern Video card.
Good Luck and give us more info on your card so we can work with you.

[billybob884]

I have the same problem. For me its not so bad, but it still goes a little slow when going to Earth. I think it is because of all the satelites orbiting Earth. Try (if you dont care about the satelites) deleting them and then going to Earth. I have no idea if this will work or not, it's just a suggestion.


Mike M.

[Dnumdé]

Well, I have a 16 megabyte I/O Magic Card that has Nvidia Vanta LT as the driver. I am not exactly sure about the hardware and software OpenGL support, all I know is it supports OpenGL, and I don't have the manual on hand at the moment. I am still not quite sure what is causing it, but it may be the combined ISS and Hubble which are slow on their own, and they do take up a lot of RAM space. I will try deleting those from the solarsys file, but without saving them just in case I want them again

Other than this, there are no other problems whatsoever.

[D.Edwards]

Well your card does suport hardware OpeenGL. Just download the newest drivers from NVidia's web site for your OS. The thing that is slowing your down is the cards memory bus. The TNT Vanta cards don't have a 128bit memory bus as the Regular TNT cards do. It has a 64bit memory bus much like what NVidia did to the GeForceMX 200 series cards. This will definetly slow the cards ability to render the images for Celestia. You could try one of the many NVida card overclock utilities out there on the net to see if you might squeeze a little more bandwidth from the card but your main problen is the memory bus and having only 16MB of VRAM. This card will get you by but don't expect Celestia to run its best by a long shot. As I said before start to save some money for an upgrade to at least a GeForce2 level card with 32MB of SDRAM. You can pick one up starting as low as $45. You didn't specify wether the card was AGP or PCI so I can't point you in any direction in that field and that to could be part of the problem because if its a PCI version it will naturaly be slower than an AGP version and the PCI bus would be a bottleneck as well.
As for deleting the satalites you don't have to delete them. You can just edit the solarsystem.ssc to deactivate them inbstead. Just open the .ssc file with notepad and scroll down to were the satalites are located and in front of the first line put a # sign and 1 space with your spacebar. After your done editing the file save it and try and see if you get a speed up or not. Sorry I couldn't give you better info or news on your video card but you can try the overclock thing and the edit of the soloarsystem.ssc and see if that helps. If you have any more questions I check the forum daily.

[Dnumdé]

Thanks for the info...yeah I will definitely get a new card when I have the money. And furthermore, my card is PCI. I have not yet deleted them, but it did occur to me to place a # before each one that i want to disable.