[OpenIndiana-discuss] Nvidia Driver 295.53

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Sat, 2 Jun 2012, russell wrote:

> I noticed after upgrading to Nvidia Driver 295.53 that the driver supports a 
> colour depth of 30 giving 1.1 billion colours as an experimental feature does 
> the current release of X implemented in OI_151.1.4 support the 30 bit colour 
> depth. If the 30 bit colour depth is selected it warns about X support and 
> that some applications do not support 30bit depth. If the application does 
> not support  30 bit depth will it operate at 24 bit depth and still be 
> displayed or will the application not display anything or crash?

I don't see much value to enabling 30-bit color depth unless you have 
a display and path to that display which supports 10-bits/channel. 
There are LCD panels available which support 10-bits/channel via 
DisplayPort.  Many modern TVs will accept 10-bits/channel via HDMI, 
even if they don't internally support all the levels.  Professional 
displays supporting HD-SDI will support 10-bits/channel and Nvidia 
offers boards with an HD-SDI output.

There might be some value offered from 30-bit color depth when using 
OpenGL since the extra depth may improve the quality of calculations, 
even if you can not see a visual improvement to the results.  However, 
OpenGL also supports floating-point types.

Bob
-- 
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/