Graphics configuration
Most of the graphics settings can be adjusted using the Preferences dialog.
Resolution and mode
You can find the Resolution and mode configuration under the
Graphics tab.
Display mode – select between fullscreen mode and windowed mode. In the case of full screen, you can choose the resolution from a list of supported resolutions in a drop down menu. If you choose windowed mode, you can enter the resolution you want. You can also choose whether the window should be resizable or not. In order to switch from full screen mode to windowed mode during the execution, use the key F11.
V-sync – enable v-sync to limit the frame rate to the refresh rate of your monitor. In some cases this may help reducing tearing.
Maximum frame rate – it is possible to set a maximum frame rate by ticking this checkbox and entering a positive integer value. The frame rate will be capped to that value.
Graphics settings
Graphics quality
This setting governs the size of the textures, the complexity of the models and also the quality of some graphical effects like the light glow or the lens flare. Here are the differences:
Low – very low resolution textures, mostly 1K (1024x512), and fewer sample counts for the visual effects than in higher quality settings. Low-fidelity Milky Way model.
Normal – moderately low resolution textures (2K when available). The graphical effects use a reasonable amount of quality for nice visuals without compromising the performance too much. Medium-fidelity Milky Way model.
High – high-resolution 4K (3840x2160) textures. Graphical effects use a large number of samples. High-fidelity Milky Way model. This may be taxing even on good graphics cards.
Ultra – very high resolution textures (8K, 16K, etc.). Ultra-high-fidelity Milky Way model.
Antialiasing
In the Graphics tab you can also find the antialiasing
configuration. Applying antialiasing removes the jagged edges of the
scene and makes it look better. However, it does not come free of cost,
and usually has a penalty on the frames per second (FPS). There are four
main options, described below.
Find more information on antialiasing in the Antialiasing section.
No Antialiasing
If you choose this no antialiasing will be applied, and therefore you
will probably see jagged edges around models. This has no penalty on
either the CPU or the GPU. If want you enable antialiasing with
override application settings in your graphics card driver
configuration program, you can leave the application antialiasing
setting to off.
FXAA – Fast Approximate Antialiasing
This is a post-processing antialiasing filter which is very fast and produces
very good results. The performance hit depends on how
fast your graphics card is, but it is generally low. Since it is a post-processing effect, this will
work also when you take screenshots or output the frames.
As of Gaia Sky 2.2.5, FXAA is activated by default.
Here is more info on FXAA.
NFAA – Normal Field Antialiasing
This is yet another post-processing antialiasing technique. It is based on generating a normal map to detect the edges for later smoothing. It may look better on some devices and the penalty in FPS is small. It will also work for the screenshots and frame outputs.
Point cloud style
The point cloud rendering style. This affects the rendering of all particle datasets (Oort cloud, SDSS, etc.) and also stars (including Hipparcos and all Gaia-based catalogs, as well as variable stars).
Triangles – in this mode, the data points are rendered as billboards (quads composed of two triangles each which always face the camera). The data is sent to the GPU per vertex, and each star has 4 vertices and 6 indices, so even though the rendering is straightforward, there is a degree of memory wasting by duplicating data per vertex. This is generally fast with new hardware which has ample VRAM to spare. This mode produces geometrically correct stars, which means that they have consistent scene orientations in cubemap mode, eliminating the seams completely. Use this or its instanced counterpart when using the panorama or planetarium modes.
Triangles (instanced) – same as triangles, but using GPU instanced rendering. In this case, only 6 vertices are sent to the GPU and the rest of the attributes are sent once per star. There is no memory wasting, but it may be slower on older hardware.
Legacy (point primitives) – This is the mode used in Gaia Sky before
3.1.7. It uses point primitives (GL_POINTS) to render point clouds. The points are rasterized in image space, so they are not consistently projected across the whole field of view. Otherwise, this mode is fine for the regular use of Gaia Sky, and tends to perform better with older hardware.
Line style
Select the line rendering backend.
GPU lines – use the line primitives offered by the graphics driver. The orbits are sent to the GPU in a buffer only once, the rest of the custom lines are computed on the CPU and sent over each frame. Quite fast.
Polyline quadstrips – use polygon lines. The positions and orientations of the polygon vertices are computed on the CPU each frame according to the current camera configuration. Better looking but slower.
Bloom effect
This slider controls the amount of bloom (light bleeding from bright to dark areas) to apply to the scene. Bring it all the way down to zero to disable bloom altogether.
Unsharp mask factor
This slider controls the amount of sharpening to apply to the scene with the unsharp mask effect. Increasing the unsharp mask factor makes the visuals sharper but possibly introduces aliasing and visual artifacts. Bring it all the way down to zero to disable the unsharp mask effect.
Lens flare
Activate the procedural, pseudo lens flare effect.
Motion blur
Activate the camera motion blur effect.
Fade time
Set the time it takes for objects to fade in and out when their visibility is modified, either via the “Object visibility” pane or using the individual visibility toggle. This value is in milliseconds.
Elevation representation
Choose the way elevation (height) is represented in Gaia Sky.
Tessellation – use geometry subdivision by tessellation. This may be taxing on integrated or old graphics cards. Disable if frame rate is low.
Parallax mapping – use parallax mapping in the fragment shaders.
None – do not represent elevation.
Shadows
Enable or disable shadows, and choose their properties.
Shadow map resolution – choose the resolution of the shadow map textures to use.
# shadows – how many shadows are active at a time in the scene.
Image levels
Control the image levels
Brightness – overall brightness of the image.
Contrast – overall contrast of the image.
Hue – hue value of the image.
Saturation – saturation value of the image.
Gamma correction – gamma correction value of the image. This should be calibrated with your monitor.
HDR tone mapping type – tone mapping algorithm to use. Choose
Automaticto use a real-time adjusting mode based on the overall lightness of the image. All the others are static algorithms.
Experimental
This section contains experimental graphics options:
Dynamic resolution – the resolution of the back-buffer is adapted depending on the frame rate to avoid too drastic slow-downs. The dynamic resolution is adjusted according to some predefined back-buffer scale factors: 1, 0.85 and 0.75. The resolution of the back-buffer is scaled by the next value if the frame rate is below 30, and to the previous level if it is over 60. This should provide smoother frame-rates on older hardware, and in some GPU demanding situations.
Screen space reflections – activates SSR (screen space reflections). In this method, a post-process step traces the reflections for each reflective surface in the image. This has an impact on performance but produces nice-looking reflections on metallic surfaces. If this is off, it falls back to cubemap reflections with a default sky box of the milky way. The default location of the sky box is
$GS_DATA/tex/skybox/gaiasky.
A rendering of Gaia with SSR activated