In de "Ask Grandmaster B." (Q&A column van Brian Hook bij Voodoo Extreme) van vandaag een vraag/opmerking over 48-bits kleurdiepte in spellen. Een palette van 16.777.216 kleurtjes heeft blijkbaar ook zo z'n beperkingen. Check it out:
In your reply to Sean, who failed to see the relevance of future 48 bit color depth, you only addressed the point of smooth gradients, and missed, IMHO, a more important reason for 48 bit (16,16,16) color. Just as it has been shown that 16-bit (5,6,5) can have problems with multipass blending in some current games, we will also reach a point where 24 bit (8,8,8) will also suffer artifacts.Sure, we now are using maybe 3-4 passes in games, but as fill rate increases there is no reason to think that we will not want to use effects that will take maybe 7 or more passes. And when we do, even 24 bit will be pushed to the limit, and we will need those 48 bits to keep the quality decent. I can just imagine 3 to 4 years from now, some card manufacturer will still be holding on to 24 bit ("but our 24 bit color is rendered internally at 48 bits, and we have an effective 44 bit color depth in the frame buffer" ;^), while the others are moving on to 48 bit.
Who knows? Maybe the card manufacturers will go to 36 bit (12,12,12) first. We will just need to wait and see...
