16bit vs 32bit

[WyrmMaster]

There was a thread a while back about the difference between 32bit and 16bit color. Im not sure you would see much difference in games, depends on the game of courese, but these shots of my desktop pattern show the difference quite clearly.

[WyrmMaster]

And this one in 16bit.

[ebola]

yep 32 bit is 100000000000 times better for pictures. part of the problem with that picture is that all of the colors are similar. its like if i make a picture that uses 64000 shades of green and it looks like crap in 16 bit but awesome in 32 bit. if i used 64000 colors for a picture with an equal balance of red, green, blue, etc, then it wouldn't be quite so obvious. also with moving pixels i don't think it matters as much because you dont have time to see flaws.

[SP]

Yes, 32Bit is better because it offers more colors, but perhaps an even more important reason 32Bit is better than 16Bit is because 32Bit has more bits for an Alpha channel. 32Bit color is essentaill 24Bit color ( 8 bits for each R,G, and B component) with an additional 8 bits for an alpha channel. The alpha channels is the tranparency of the color and is used for stuff like alpha blending to create all kinds of nice effects. So, it becomes pretty cllear why effects like fog, smoke, shadows and other semi-transparent things can really benefit from 32Bit color.

[samuknow]

SP (Jun 09, 2001 04:01 a.m.):
Yes, 32Bit is better because it offers more colors, but perhaps an even more important reason 32Bit is better than 16Bit is because 32Bit has more bits for an Alpha channel. 32Bit color is essentaill 24Bit color ( 8 bits for each R,G, and B component) with an additional 8 bits for an alpha channel. The alpha channels is the tranparency of the color and is used for stuff like alpha blending to create all kinds of nice effects. So, it becomes pretty cllear why effects like fog, smoke, shadows and other semi-transparent things can really benefit from 32Bit color.

SP is right, you will really see the diff in the things he mentioned plus explosions are a world of difference.

[Da Whip]

On the down side , 32 bit is slower than 16. It could mean death in some games.

[Bigwave]

Da Whip (Jun 10, 2001 07:14 p.m.):
On the down side , 32 bit is slower than 16. It could mean death in some games.



Not with my GeForce3 it's not!

[supergenius74]

I believe I was the one who posted that a while back and I still am not 100% convinced. I agree that the poof of smoke durring an explosion in Q3 does look a little better but if I pause to admire it I die....so it really doesn't benifit me. I would say running in 16 bit and a higher res and fsaa is going to look and run better in one of the newer FPS or specifically deathmatch games. but on the other hand if your running an older game then by all means run 32-bit but most older games are not created with true 32 bit textures. I also believe we haven't seen the full extent of 32 bit games, I have compared 2d greyscale images of 16bit and 32 bit and yes there is actually a difference but i think that most game creators don't take the time to really use it to the fullest extent, in other words they don't have the time to use all the shades but that is just my opinion...:-)

[Phil]

It won't be long until 32bit is a standard, when I first got my pc 640x480 was considered a luxery and hi-res and look where we are now 1280x1024 anti-alias per pixel shaded what hav-ya

[dolemitecomputer]

Maestro (Jun 12, 2001 03:58 a.m.):
I find that 16 bit is the best compromise between color and speed...

Maestro

I think with the majority of processors today and video cards that is not much of an issue.

[Phil]

the way you say compromise between performance and speed suggests there is an option below 16bit.
Current vid cards are that fast that 32bit is not just a nice option but you may as well run at it, as long as you get steady frame rates over 60fps or so then it looks smooth.

[dolemitecomputer]

I hope I don't make this thread a pain to download but I took some quick screen shots using Quake 3. The 16-bit settings are 16-bit color depth and textures. The same for 32-bit.
You will see a few differences...the text for the menus appears better in the 32-bit shots....does seem to more complete. Also the waterfall seems to have better texture in 32-bit and the sky is different which I'm not sure is a good or bad thing. The green tunnel shots are not much different from each other but as you can see the frame rate count is basically the same in both color settings.

[dolemitecomputer]

16 bit number 1.

[dolemitecomputer]

16-bit number 2.

[dolemitecomputer]

32-bit number 1.

[dolemitecomputer]

32-bit number 2 and the last one.

[Phil]

Sorry to complain but on my lousy 56k (only on a full moon when the planets align and I stand in a bucket muttering the I'm a little tea cup short and spout) took ages downloading them, might I suggest uploading them to a geocities account or something with a link instead, that way those who want to see them can and those that don't don't have too.

[dolemitecomputer]

I really apologize for that everyone. I will try to take some more screenshots but post them somewhere else with a link here to them.

[Pitspawn]

Lets face it people, 16bit is very soon to become obsolete. 32 Bit colour has been round since TNT cards were top of the range. Theres only one reason that 32bit isn't standard...Because ram manufacturers cant pull their act together and make some fast ram. The only decent VRAM manufacturers ive seen are EliteMT capable of hitting 600Mhz DDR.

Its a shame really because I've read a report from god (John Carmack) telling that 32Bit isnt even enough at times. The internal calculations should be far greater than 32Bit especially now because games are using multitexturing and hordes of sprites with tranclucency.

The only time i think 16bit is acceptable is at high resolution (>=1024x768) with GOOD dithering techniques.

Thankfully i havent had to put up with 16bit for over 3 years, I've got through a Geforce 256 Annihilator Pro, Geforce GTS2 and now a HP3 Geforce3. All were perfectly capable of >=80fps @ 32bit in all games i ran at the time.
IMHO anything above 80fps is unoticable to 80fps.

[jeff_harrison_344]

I disagree that 16bit is obselete. In about half of my games that I own, I run a lot in 16bit. You see, 16bit is like the 'option' of the games. If there was only 32bit, then what if You had a game where it would be very hard to tell between 16 and 32bit, but you HAD to run in 32bit, therefore decreasing your frames.

I have about 5 games where it is hard to tell between 16 and 32bit, and I have the choice:

1024x768 in 32bit and get 60FPS
Or I could run a higher res. at 16bit and get 60+FPS

And I would virtually not know the difference in colors!

Now I kknow that there are a lot of newer games out, where 16bit, well, looks like garbage, to say the least, but I still disagree that 16bit is obselete. I hope that 16bit is around as long as it needs to be that extra 'option' for me.


My $.02

[SP]

When He says 16bit will become obsolete, I don't think he means that future video cards will not support 16bit color modes. I think what he means it that all future games will be developed and optimized for 32bit or higher modes and that also future 3d cards will be optimized to perform best in 32bit color modes. Legacy support will still be there and you'll still be able to play your 16bit games. In fact every video card made today still supports basic VGA or 16 color (not to be confused with 16bit color) mode. When you system first starts up before windows loads your card is functioning like an old IBM VGA card and supports all those old modes. A video card has to support all these old modes in order to be compatable and in case say you run an old 8bit 256 color game or whatever. So, you don't have to worry much about not being able to run 16bit color games in the future (or at least not the forseeable future anyway). Anyway, it's possible that a video card could be made to run 16bit games in 16bit color mode even if it only supported internally rendering in 32bit mode. It could just pad out the extra bits. You wouldn't get any better quality that way, but it would be a way for the card to still maintain legacy support for games that required 16bit color.


As for 32bit being slower, that may be so today, but it may not necessarily be so in the future. Todays modern systems are about as fast in 32bit mode as they are in 16bit mode, but that's not what I'm talking about. It's entirely possible that in the future there could be cards that are faster in 32bit mode than in 16bit mode. 3D chipset makers could build their future chipsets in such ways that they would be optimized for working on and transfering data in certain size chunks and if they did so it might be possible that those chipsets could be optimized in such a way that 16bit mode might actually be slower than 32bit. A good analogy to this might be past CPUs. When the P6 family of processors was first introduced with the Pentium Pro, It was optimized for working on 32bit chunks of data. When it had to operate on 16Bit data it actually took a performance hit and was slower than it's predecessor the original Pentium or P5. Of course we're not talking about CPUs here, but my point is that is possible and perhaps quite likely that future GPUs will not only be just as fast in 32Bit color but may actually be faster due to the way they are optimized. Of course they'll probably still be as fast as or faster for your older 16bit color games than the cards those games were designed to run on.

[jeff_harrison_344]

Nice post :)


About the 32bit being slower know, but I still believe that it is going to be about 2 years before 32bit is like 16bit , and 64bit is like 32bit. Because as of know, and prolly the next year, 32bit will always be a slow down in our games.