16 bit

[Steelski]

I discovered that some games are really really sticky at high res with 32bit. I was trying to play dawn of war with a 9800pro at 1600x1200 and high settings.
guess what, it really dident go.
so i thought, i might aswell try with 16 bit.
guess what, it flew. infact it flew so much that I decided to switch res again, to 1920x1440 x16bit with everything high!!!!!! (no AA ofcourse). I must say that i am very very pleased with the performance. i have never seen DOW looking so nice (apart from the phenominal intro looking just plain wrong in 16bit).

I noticed also that with GTA san andreas, i was able to use 1600x1200 with 6xAA (some crappy artifacts appeared).

Am i the only person who still likes the sheer speediness of 16bit.

Also could someone explain why exactly there is such a massive performance increase from going to 16 bit. I am guessing its because it uses half the bandwidth. in which case it really shows how stuck cards are with even a 256big bus.

 

[Bull Dog]

The IQ loss/speed gain with games that that support 16bit rendering isn't worth it to be. Never has been I'd rather play at a lower rez with more IQ.

 

[BassBomb]

yea i remember i forced 24 bit colors on far cry to try and ease out better performance on my cousins Ti4200... turns out made the shading look soo bad

32 was so good

 

[bunnyfubbles]

Oooohhh, yeah, uhhhhmmm, I'm gonna have ta go ahead and sort of disagree with you there. Yeah...

 

[Bateluer]

I didn't use to see a difference between 16 and 32 bit, until I get my GF1 DDR and was actually able to use 32 bit color. Now, I cannot switch back to 16 without being disgusted with the lousy IQ.

 

[PhlashFoto]

I also had read somewhere that if you disable your sound card, the game will speed up even faster!!!!! Try that.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

I always use 16-bit whenever possible. On my 9200 every frame per second counts.

 

[Steelski]

Well, I am talking about some games, I know that IQ is not as good, but its not bad either, its not like there are artifacts everywhere. And i am playing at 1920x1440 with 8xAF on a 9800pro. the frames do not drop down below 30fps and the nearest playable resolution for this game in 32bit mode is 1280x1024 with no AA or AF.
Also this is a drop down perspective game not a FPS where i would not dream of dropping to 16bit, especially in farcry.

 

[Griswold]

16bit is ok, especially since many of todays fast TFT panels are only 6bit instead of 8bit and thus cant show the full 24/32bit colorspace anyway. And I bet, many dont even know that they wont get to see the full 32bit on their screen, yet will tell you how much 16bit sucks.

 

[ProviaFan]

I can clearly see a large difference between 16 bit and 24/32 bit color modes, and can not stand to use the former, no matter what performance compromises must be made.

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: Griswold
16bit is ok, especially since many of todays fast TFT panels are only 6bit instead of 8bit and thus cant show the full 24/32bit colorspace anyway. And I bet, many dont even know that they wont get to see the full 32bit on their screen, yet will tell you how much 16bit sucks.

The method of dithering is very different on a TFT than on 16 bit mode. 16 bit in Windows uses Floyd-Steinberg (error diffusion dithering) and TFTs use frame rate control (flickering of cells) most of the time. 16.2m TFTs can display 253^3 (16,194,277) colors and 16.7m TFTs can display 256^3 (16,777,216). So, in reality, 6 bit TFTs can display the whole range by expanding dynamic range to allow the last few shades to be displayed.