24 or 32 Bit Colour?

[speg]

Which is better? Whats the differnece?

I just switched from 16 to 32 and stuff that used to be one colour is now another.

Could this be the reason why some of my games are so dark?

 

[stso]

I can't really tell the difference between 24bits and 32bits .....

 

[AncientPC]

32-bit color depth offers more colors than 24-bit color depth, but the change is almost unnoticeable. However, the change from 16-bit to 24-bit is noticeable.

That's not why your games are so dark, check the individual game's gamma settings.

 

[mindiris]

24bits are actually what is used. The extra 8 bits in 32bit color are used for the alpha channel (or transparency). 32bit color is arranged in RGBA (more or less), with 8 bits per channel. This means 32bit color has the same color accuracy as 24bit color.

The main reason 24bit color is a bit hard to find nowadays is because 32bit color is word aligned in memory (4 bytes), hence quicker to access. 24bit color is essentially packed (3 bytes), and harder to access quickly.

As for games being darker, adjust your gamma or birghtness levels in that particular game, or failing that, your video drivers if possible. Be careful to only nudge it one way or another. You can get some pretty ugly colors if you take it too far.

Video cards all have differing ideas of what color is, expecially ye ol' 3Dfx's wonderfully off center 1.7 gamma levels back when they were dominant. Games used to look quite dark with Nvida boards for this exact reason. Anyone remember using the utility "idgamma" for quake 1 or 2? Fun stuff. Lava can turn pinkish grey with a few overzealous modifications to the config files!

 

[bacillus]

OGL accelerated games don't support 24 bit colour!

 

[Joemonkey]

humans can't tell the difference between 24 and 32 bit color, but it makes it easier for the video card to use the 32 bit color due to the 4 byte thing mentioned earlier

 

[speg]

Doh! I ment 16 Bit to 32 Bit. So would their be big differences then?