i've read somewhere that the whole radeon 5k and 6k series is build from the ground up to support 10-bit, but mysteriously amd seems to forgot the implementation in its drivers... at least in the catalyst consumer package.

Even the 4000 cards actually support 10-bit, but AMD/nvidia think windows users somehow deserve less.

If you think you can see a difference between 24bit(+alpha = 32-bit) color and 30, 36, 48 or even the ultra 64-bit color you are hardly mistaken... ;)

As far as I'm aware the human eye can distinguish between 7 million and 12 million colors (at tops), while 24 bits is already more than 16 million colors, 30 bits = 1 billion , 36 bits = 69 billion and 48 bits = ~ 282 trillion colors, hahahaha!!

TAViXIf you think you can see a difference between 24bit(+alpha = 32-bit) color and 30, 36, 48 or even the ultra 64-bit color you are hardly mistaken... ;)

As far as I'm aware the human eye can distinguish between 7 million and 12 million colors (at tops), while 24 bits is already more than 16 million colors, 30 bits = 1 billion , 36 bits = 69 billion and 48 bits = ~ 282 trillion colors, hahahaha!!

When you mix heory, practice and gamma curves, it gets a bit more complicated.

Imagine a "greyscale". On a 24 bit colour monitor, this is only 8 bit greyscale. YES, you can see the banding pretty easily. Now, add a gamma curve, ie. non-linear, and you actually reduce the effective bit-depth very quickly, where shades jump a couple of bands (where the curve is steep) or stay in the same identical shade, even when they should different (when the curve is shallow).

This is why medical monitors (viewing x-rays etc) went very quickly to 10bit with internal processing at 12bit to try to reduce this problem so the doctors could actually spot the hairline fractures in bones etc.

What is true for greyscale is true for mono-colour, and by extension, is true for RGB albeit less noticable. But in my own experience, trying to calibrate a 24bit professional monitor to perfectly show PANTONE print colours is impossible. You can get some right, but not across the spectrum. However, with 36bit+ colour space this is much easier to do.

Now 24bit is actually a silly "truth" for visual perception. If you add 255 red, 255 blue and 0 or 1 green, then no, you will not notice any difference. But try calibrating a whole bunch of colour spaces, and 24 bit really isnt good enough.

NOT that you will notice any difference in a first person shooter. But you WOULD notice the difference if the Food Magazine had meat just a little bit green. LOL.

TAViXAlready at 120 dpi, thank you. Already at second beer, thank you very much ;)
I was talking about the icons in programs like AutoCAD, Maya, 3DS, iDEAS, CADceus, etc, etc, that don't scale well with high dpi settings.
Also the stupid text books like the ones Cisco have for study. They are written in flash, java, whatever, and you cannot make the text bigger at all. Not even by increasing dpi.....
But the most important thing is that I keep the screen at least half of meter from my eyes. I still don't need glasses, but that can change if I stay to close to the screen to read crappy small text....

Ah, I see your issue.

Yes, WHEN WILL WE HAVE TRUE scalable desktop?

All I can suggest is an icon in the taskba allowing you to quickly change resolutions for that nasty oldskool software. Alternatively, try to find a Flash manager than has a zoom function.

Yeah, that sucks, I know.... :(

Interesting post the one with medical monitors. I didn't know that. Tnks.