Modern low performance, high functionality cards are about $50 U.S. This can be provided by software libraries (like Microsoft's) or implemented in the graphics hardware. It's not the performance that it needs, but rather the 3D functionality of OpenGL. If anything, I would have expected it would require a high performance processor to calculate all those object positions.Īm I to understand all those calculations are taking place on the graphics card? I am still at a lost to understand why Celestia requires such a high performance card. I will try running the program on a better computer and see what happens. I was surprised to hear the video cards are so much faster now as in my business, (machine automation), video is not all that important beyond displaying a menu. I have never been much into video games except the one mentioned above. (This is "space" we are talking about so I would not expect all that stuff). Why is this program so labor intensive on the card? Although Celestia is a very cool program on so many levels, I just dont see the amazing graphics. There were a lot more grahics moving much faster around the screen than in Celestia. It required some spiffy graphics processing speed or the frame rate was slow. Upgrading to a more modern graphics card would be better, though, if you can afford it.īack in the old days, I used to play a flight simulator game called Falcon 3.0 by NovaLogic (or something like that) (And will let you use textures up to 1K.) Although it's slow and limited in functionality, the software OpenGL library that's included is relatively bug-free.
If you're running Windows, you should download and install DirectX v9.0c.
As Fridger mentioned, the OpenGL drivers provided long ago by 3DFX are obsolete and buggy.
You'll actually get better 3D graphics (although slower) if you disable hardware graphics acceleration entirely and use software OpenGL routines. I thought your were talking about professional level equipment Sorry.
Is this the latest driver you can get for your card? You will be unable to render the majority of 3d effects with this driver.
Version 1.1.0 is officially UNSUPPORTED in the context of Celestia.
Your OpenGL version is hopelessly outdated. I wrote earlier that I am using typically 2048x2048 texture tiles, making up HUGE and most detailed textures of 2-4 GB! With your tiny texture size and little RAM, you could never even develop a /feel/ for what you are missing. Correspondingly my fps rate is always close to 100/sec and often in the 120's, all based on 32 bitplane color, 4x anti alias and 1600x1200 resolution My CPU is 3.2 GHz with 3 GB (!) of CL2 RAM. Presumably your CPU is correspondingly "senior"? Just for "normalization", my graphics card uses 256 MB of DDR RAM and supports the OpenGL 2.0 Render path. I am sorry to say so, but this is just not an appropriate graphics card equipment for an OpenGL program as complex as Celestia. Renderer: 3Dfx/Voodoo3 (tm)/2 TMUs/16 MB SDRAM/KNI/ICD (Jan 16 2001)