How were these graphics achieved?

[slappy101]

Andromeda/Milky Way collision (simulation)

The graphics of this video compared to my Andromeda/Milkway collision are far better, I've tried increasing the dust but that didn't seem to work.

[dhm794]

It's very strange with this game.  I tried playing it on my laptop (which runs Fallout: New Vegas at medium quality) with Universe Sandbox, and the quality sucked.  Then I tried it on another computer, which can hardly run any games, and Universe Sandbox is great on it.

[slappy101]

Just to clarify, increasing the dust value changes the "quality", but not to anything nearly as good as that. And it looks rendered, not real-time to me as there seems to be almost no graphical lag, I'm running on an i5/GTX460 setup and am still only pushing 10-15 FPS with x2.5 dust

[Dan Dixon]

Andromeda/Milky Way collision (simulation)
I've tried increasing the dust but that didn't seem to work.

You need to change the dust multiplier and then reopen the simulation. Although too high of a value will make it run very slowly, no worries, you can always lower it.

[Triplanetary]

It's very strange with this game.  I tried playing it on my laptop (which runs Fallout: New Vegas at medium quality) with Universe Sandbox, and the quality sucked.  Then I tried it on another computer, which can hardly run any games, and Universe Sandbox is great on it.

Well, a "normal" game like FONV is going to be more demanding on your graphics card. Whereas my perception is that Universe Sandbox is more demanding on your CPU, what with all the position, velocity, gravity, etc. calculations. So how well a computer runs other games probably won't predict how well US will run.

The laptop I'm on now has POS graphics card but a decent, dual-core CPU. It can't even run games from 2007 all that well, but it runs Universe Sandbox like a champ.

[dhm794]

It's very strange with this game.  I tried playing it on my laptop (which runs Fallout: New Vegas at medium quality) with Universe Sandbox, and the quality sucked.  Then I tried it on another computer, which can hardly run any games, and Universe Sandbox is great on it.

Well, a "normal" game like FONV is going to be more demanding on your graphics card. Whereas my perception is that Universe Sandbox is more demanding on your CPU, what with all the position, velocity, gravity, etc. calculations. So how well a computer runs other games probably won't predict how well US will run.

The laptop I'm on now has POS graphics card but a decent, dual-core CPU. It can't even run games from 2007 all that well, but it runs Universe Sandbox like a champ.

I've got a 2.53 GHz Intel Core i5 CPU.  Doesn't that seem like more than enough to run the game well?

[Dan Dixon]

I've got a 2.53 GHz Intel Core i5 CPU.  Doesn't that seem like more than enough to run the game well?

It's all relative. Universe Sandbox will let you create more objects and dust particles than even the fastest computer available today can run smoothly.

[dhm794]

I've got a 2.53 GHz Intel Core i5 CPU.  Doesn't that seem like more than enough to run the game well?

It's all relative. Universe Sandbox will let you create more objects and dust particles than even the fastest computer available today can run smoothly.

I've tried it on a desktop computer with a low-quality Nvidia graphics card and 2.3 GHz processor, and the quality was great. 

[Darvince]

It's called dust multiplier is something like 25x in that video. He also said it took 12.5 hours to get that 4 minutes.

[Triplanetary]

It's called dust multiplier is something like 25x in that video. He also said it took 12.5 hours to get that 4 minutes.

Plus, his computer caught fire immediately afterward.

No, I made that up.

[diamondthree]

This program is all about the speed of a single processor core.  Everything else comes second, from a performance standpoint.

The reason many find somewhat older PC's running it better is because the program isn't terribly demanding of a video card, but is extremely demanding of a processor core (only 1 core, to boot).

midrange dual, tri, and quad core processors from within the past couple years tend to have great multitasking ability but each individual core is usually 3.4GHz or less (mainstream i-series, phenoms, etc.).  Go back a couple more years and you find processors with fast single cores often well above 3.4GHz (athlon 64's, whatever intel was selling during that time period [lol], etc.)

Happened to me.  I replaced my AMD 4000+ with a quad core phenom (and a whole new PC around it, too) and my universe sandbox performance took a big dive.  Waiting impatiently on the upcoming multicore processing patch. =D