No. The Z-Buffer is only used to keep track of which pixels are "in front of" which other pixels that are at the same location on the screen buffer.

Some cards have a "color depth same as desktop" selection that will make games run at 16-bit if your desktop is at 16-bit. Failing that, you'll just have to hope that each game lets you choose which color depth to run at.

Most modern 3D accelerated games are designed to run exclusively at 32-bit color depths, as modern cards shouldn't take much of a performance hit and the quality increase is very noticable (16-bit results in a lot of dithering, which I remember well from playing Half-Life on my TNT1 until I found the command line parameter to run the game at 32bpp)

el_pusher: you mean you haven't red "dosbox guides" - "how to speed up dosbox"? 😳

@robertmo:

Why are you asking me that? I am talking about running Windows games exclusively.

@HunterZ:

Thanks for the clarifications. Somehow, I feared it cannot be done. Most games are indeed made to be run at 32bpp resolutions. The only way to speed things up is running them at lower resolutions.

eL_PuSHeR wrote:

You may now be wondering why I posted this in the WINDOWS section. Here is your answer. I would like to know if there is some specific way to FORCE RUNNING every windows game at 16bpp. I already know some games allow you to specify output video mode, but the majority of them doesn't.

Perhaps you could use the Microsoft Compatibility Administrator from the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit version 4.0.1 to try and solve your problem. One of the compatibility fixes is labeled: ForceDisplayMode.

"This compatibility fix applies to applications that require a specific resolution to run. It takes a command line to specify the resolution. The command line options must specify the width (pixels), height (pixels), and color depth (bits). If the desired resolution is omitted, the current system resolution will be used. For example, if you specify a setting of 1024,768,16 the application will use a setting of 1024x768 at a color depth of 16 bits. If you were to specify the command line of ,,16, the application would use the current system resolution but would change to 16-bit color depth."

Hope this helps,

dvwjr

Thanks for the tip, dvwjr

However, I am thinking that using the compatibility kit is aimed mainly to applications rather than games. The latter tend to manage everything by themselves but, who knows?

eL_PuSHeR wrote:

Thanks for the tip, dvwjr

However, I am thinking that using the compatibility kit is aimed mainly to applications rather than games. The latter tend to manage everything by themselves but, who knows?

Nah, 'application' is just a fancy IT word for 'programs'. It's all just code.

I use the ACT shim for "ForceDisplay" myself on some Windows games. It works. The nice thing is that you can create databases with custom fixes. This would be a good way for the membership of VOGONs to create new fixes for older Windows games that Microsoft has not yet included in their database.

Once you create a custom entry on your system, the custom 'forced' display mode just happens automatically. Really a nice feature that Microsoft put out so that old Win-9x APIs can be made to function under the WinXP+ Win32 codebase.

dvwjr