STRANGE Video card

[cartrite]

Hi all,

Someone contacted me with a question about the addon I did of Mars.
He can't see the 4k texture. Sees the 2k and 1k fine. Now this person has an ATIRadeon X1900 with 512mb ram and the OpenGl info reports that his Max texture size is 2048. This sounds like a powerful card. Shoudn't it perform better? Not knowing a thing about ATI cards , I told him he should contact ATI and ask them. I would think with all that ram on the video card and 2 gb of system ram with an Athlon 64 dual procesors, he could do better.

cartrite

[selden]

ATI cards are limited to 2K textures on models.
Only Nvidia cards can display 4K textures.

[Johaen]

ATI cards are limited to 2K textures on models.
Only Nvidia cards can display 4K textures.

This is the main reason I plan on getting an NVidia card with my new PC.

[cartrite]

See now I never knew that. So there's nothing this guy can do.
I wonder, Is there any plans in develpoment that would increase performance for other cards like ATI? Or is it ATI's driver issues that limit them?

Anyhow I can see that there are going to be a gazillion questions like this that I won't be able to answer which will probally drive me crazy. Oh well I asked for it.

Thanks Selden, I need to broaden my Knowledge.

cartrite

[selden]

My understanding is that it's a hardware design issue, not something that can be fixed in the driver.

Matrox chipsets also are limited to 2K textures.

SIS and Intel are limited to 1K textures, as is Microsoft's software implementation of OpenGL.

Old cards may have even smaller maximum texture sizes.

[Fightspit]

All ATI RADEON X1800 and X1900 support 4K textures:

Code: Select all

Advanced Image Quality Features

        * 64-bit floating point HDR rendering supported throughout the pipeline
              o Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing
        * 32-bit integer HDR (10:10:10:2) format supported throughout the pipeline
              o Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing
        * 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes
              o Multi-sample algorithm with gamma correction, programmable sparse sample patterns, and centroid sampling
              o New Adaptive Anti-Aliasing feature with Performance and Quality modes
              o Temporal Anti-Aliasing mode
              o Lossless Color Compression (up to 6:1) at all resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions
        * 2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes
              o Up to 128-tap texture filtering
              o Adaptive algorithm with Performance and Quality options
        * High resolution texture support (up to 4k x 4k)



from : http://www.ati.com/products/radeonx1900/specs.html
and http://www.ati.com/products/radeonx1800/specs.html

[cartrite]

Fightspit Wrote:

All ATI RADEON X1800 and X1900 support 4K textures:

But does Celestia support ATI

My first responce to the questioner, after he confirmed the open-gl info of max texture size being 2k, was to suggest contacting ATI support to see if it could be configured to handle 4k textures. He replied back as if he were satisfied that his card was the problem. Not sure if he is following up on it or not.

[cartrite]

And the second suggestion was a driver update. After the update he reported that open-gl reported max tex size at 4k and all was well. He can now see 4k textures on the Mars model.

cartrite

[selden]

Great!

I'll add this info to the Preliminary FAQ.

[danielj]

Talking about this,can any Nvidia video card display 8k or larger textures?

ATI cards are limited to 2K textures on models.
Only Nvidia cards can display 4K textures.

[selden]

Daniel,

The largest single texture that can be displayed on a Mesh, moving Cloud or Ring is 4K.

Celestia cuts up Textures larger than 4K (or whatever the maximum is for the graphics chipset) into smaller pieces to draw them on its internal spherical objects (planets & moons) and on non-moving Clouds. It cannot do this for a 3D Mesh, moving Cloud or Ring.

[danielj]

iT??S REALLY BAD NEWS.It means that Nvidia cards no longer has ANY advantage over ATI cards.It??s a pity...

Daniel,

The largest single texture that can be displayed on a Mesh, moving Cloud or Ring is 4K.

Celestia cuts up Textures larger than 4K (or whatever the maximum is for the graphics chipset) into smaller pieces to draw them on its internal spherical objects (planets & moons) and on non-moving Clouds. It cannot do this for a 3D Mesh, moving Cloud or Ring.

[selden]

This week.

The graphics companies have always played "leap frog". It's just been surprising that ATI took so long this time to include the newest graphics functions in their cards.

[bh]

Hehe...I'm still on the old GeForce2MMX200...this is why you guys have left me lightyears behind.

An upgrade is due anytime I can get my Wife/daughter/son/daughter/bank manager/PA/secretary to agree that this stuff is relavant!

Only kidding...I hope!