doesn't r300 have 128 bit color?

[gjspear]

i had heard before r300 was announced that it would have 128 bit color rendering as compared to 32-bit which is used by all the cards available today. but i couldn't find it in any of the previews except the fact that it has 8 128 bit floating point pipeline. does that mean the same.

 

[Tennoh]

Simple description as I understand it is that everything internally can be made with 128bit FP colour accuracy. However at the final stage where the the signal needs to be converted to analog signal as it gets passed out as 10bits per channel like the Matrox Parhelia. Maybe this would be different if it weren't needed to be changed to analog, say digital DVI?

 

[Ryan abandoned account]

It's not the same, but DirectX9 cards will all have 128 bit color.

 

[Rand]

Internally it's rendered with 128bit colour accuracy, but the final output is still 8/8/8/8 RGB+Alpha, or 10/10/10/2 RGB+Alpha.
The 128bit internal colour accuracy still has huge benefits for rendering accuracy, and prevention of degredation or errors creeping into the rendering when appling multiple textures etc.
It's also very beneficial when extremes in multiple light sources are applied at once in any given scene.