thats becuase games won't show as much difference between 16-32 bit in that era. Most of the textures aren't very deteailed to begin with so even 32bit textures don't really look that good.

The best way to see the difference between 16-32 bit is on static images that have gradients.

philscomputerlab wrote:

Do cards in 16 bit dither and does resolution play a part?

That depends on the hardware. Some cards use dithering in 16-bit, but only for alphablending. For solid gradients you will see banding like emosun showed.

Quake was designed for regular 256-colour VGA, so its textures are very low in colour anyway. So it's not a good test-case for 16-bit vs 32-bit colour.

Scali wrote:

Quake was designed for regular 256-colour VGA, so its textures are very low in colour anyway. So it's not a good test-case for 16-bit vs 32-bit colour.

IIRC Quake and Quake 2 only use 8-bit textures.

32-bit was the next big thing in 98/99, so it got blown out of proportion, very much like 4K is today. It only started to matter later on.

Thanks for the info everyone. I did some more searching and often the skies are used as they have a gradient. Might check it out.

But yea, it seems it was quite overrated 😀 The forums must have been busy discussing all of this.

I recall that I ran software in 16-bit most of the time back then. The visual difference was quite small, and 16-bit gave quite a bit better performance and required less memory.
Then a generation later, it became a non-issue as cards became much faster and had much more memory, so you just ran 32-bit all the time.
Besides, as graphics became more complex, there was more use of alphablending/multipass stuff, so differences between 16-bit/32-bit became larger.

You can't see it on static pictures with just 8 bit textures. It became really visible with Quake 3 and its volumetric fog for example.
And it became a thing, kinda like tesselation and power efficiency, only when nVidia became good at it, before it obviously was some useless gimmick.

Cool, will check out quake 3.

UT99 is another game (just like Q3), wich clearly makes a difference on 16bit vs. 32bit colors.

You can clearly tell the difference in Quake 3. Check out the smoke that comes off the shotgun after it is fired, rocket launcher and the blood splatter. I can always tell if it is running with 32bit colours when I try that game 😀.

Half Life will also show the diffrence

Something else to keep in mind, if you're using an older LCD screen from before ~2004 (especially laptops) or even some newer dirt-cheap LCD monitors, you may not be able to tell the difference between 16 bit and 24/32 bit color depth. Many older or very cheap LCD monitors simply aren't designed to handle anything higher than 16 bit, and will automatically down-convert 24 or 32 bit color depth to 16 bit. AFAIK CRT monitors never had this issue.

16-bit has a green tinge due to the bit depth itself (6 bits green, 5 bits red and blue). Now that I've mentioned it, you'll notice it far more than you'd like now. It's the green that can't be unseen! It's like The Matrix! And despite a particular claiming otherwise, it's not lossless!!!

A lot of the bit depth disreprancies can show up easily in higher gamma values. Quake3 is overbright by default so it's easier to see banding in that. To reduce banding in Q3 you'd have to turn that off with r_overBrightBits 0.

If your 3d card doesn't support paletted texturing, then GLQuake and Quake2 won't use 8bit textures and will attempt to convert them to 16-bit which can actually lead to worse texture quality. You can see that happening in your GLQuake 16bit picture having a darker floor than the 32-bit picture.

How well does the Voodoo 3 handle colour? I've heard that it downsamples 32-bit color to 20-bit.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

How well does the Voodoo 3 handle colour? I've heard that it downsamples 32-bit color to 20-bit.

From what I read, a V3 will end with a 22-bit equivalent image. I'd like to check that out, so that's why I'm interested in all of this 😀

I will definitely check out Quake III then, it has been mentioned a few times, so it must be a good test.

I can now see the different brightness in GLQuake, interesting.

3dfx dithers its way to a 16-bit buffer with the DAC trying to make a smoothed filter process out of it. "22-bit" is all marketing schlock. This is what I wanted you to capture on VGA in the years past (for studying) and you wouldn't understand my request.
Still has the limitation of 16-bit textures, and green all over the place.

PowerVR KYRO does a similar thing.

Yes everyone railed on the Voodoo 3 for not supporting 32bit colour, but really it wasn't that important until games like Quake 3. Also the TNT2s really dropped down in speed with 32bit colour so it was a bit pointless anyway.

I'm pretty sure Voodoo 3 16bit looks better than TNT2 16bit as well.

The main issue with the Voodoo 3 was the small texture size support (which the V4 fixed, but was too late).

philscomputerlab wrote:

What games / scenes are good for testing 16 bit vs 32 bit vs V3 22 bit?

Isn't 32-bit color a bit of a misleading definition, since the last 8 bytes (correction: bits) aren't used for defining the color. I have never made a 32-bit image in photoshop, it is 24-bit, except in when exporting to printer colorspace (CMYK instead of RGB), but that has nothing to do with screen graphics.

The extra 8 bits are for the PCI bus transfer's sake IIRC.

Maybe someone could mash together a D3D or OpenGL colour gradient testing utility?

I don't think the 22 bit thing was just marketing. There are lots of reports about screenshots looking worse than on the screen.

But yes, this interest me greatly now. I'll play around with Q3A when I get back from work and see if I can find anything useful. Ideally something in one of the time demos as this makes it really easy for capturing.