Celestia 1.4preX and those of us with ATI Graphics Cards

[Apollo7]

I realize I have not posted to this board in quite some time, I am however still using Celestia and with the current pause in development I'd like to ask a question if I may. Currently I'm running an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ CPU with an ATI Radeon 9600 XT video card. This means that even on Celestia 1.3.2 I am unable to take advantage of a number of graphics eye-candy which are only available on nVidia Graphics Cards.

Celestia 1.4.0 has numerous features I'd like to take advantage of, but the Open GL 2.0 features are not fully implimented and still somewhat quirky (though newer ATI drivers has helped this). I need to know if there is anyway for ATI cards to make use of the full range of eye-candy features available? If so that would certainly be great for me as I will not be able to get a new FX card for a while. Please let me know what the status is and if there are any add-ons I might consider using. Cheers!

[Don. Edwards]

At present I do not think so. It isn't because of Chris' coding but because ATI has always been lazy about their implementation of OpenGL in favor of Microsoft's DirectX. That is why when it comes to OpenGL Nvidia still rules the roost. Your choices at this point are very limited. You can play the wait and see game and hope that ATI gets their act together, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Your card is based on technology that is 2 years old now and if they haven't done there job by now just how long are you as the consumer expected to wait? I am not going to tell you what to do but if I were you I would to honestly start rethinking on the decision you made when you bought the card. Maybe it is time for a newer card, one that is nearly 100% OpenGL compatible and I would make the move while the industry still has a decent offering of AGP cards available. AGP availability is going to start waning in the next few months as PCIx becomes the de-facto standard on all new motherboards.
I am sure this is not what you wanted to here.

Also if you could go over to the thread ?€?Celestia & Graphics cards. Your Participation Needed!
?€

[Apollo7]

Well the decision to buy the card, and to build the system came last year. I haven't had many regrets save the fact that Celestia was in large part disabled. I've had other quirky problems with certain games like The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind and Knights of the Old Republic. I believe the KOTOR issues are directly related to ATI's kludgy implimentation of OpenGL. I probably wont be able to buy a new card for another 6 months or so, could be sooner, but I'll probably go with nVidia this time. I didn't know how much of a difference it would make going from an FX 5200 to a 9600 XT, well live and learn.

Cheers.