SH5 : 16 bit colors and not 32?

[sweln]

SH5 : is it me or the game is in 16 bit colors and not 32?

When you look at a gradient in the sky or in the water, it's not smooth. It's in layers!

That's weird for a 2010 game!

[java`s revenge]

Indeed, i have it also seen. It isn`t nice

[Jeevz]

There's no way that water is 16 bit color. I bet it's just a small sky texture being stretched too big. Makes it tough to find the horizon with a zoomed in scope on a foggy night. "Is it that line? No wait it must be that line, no wait..."

[java`s revenge]

It looks like back in time maybe 80`s

[Saintaw]

I noticed it as well, when underwater or when looking at gradients in the sky in all 3 SH series, only seems to apply to large bodies though.

[starbird]

Its mainly because modern video cards only (heh, only) use 24bit colors. there are 256 shades of red green and blue. There just isn't enough colors to make a nice large gradient. Carmack advocated for 64bit color back in 2000 because of this.

There might be ways around it using shaders, which I believe are 32 or 64bit color, but I don't know enough to say.

[flakmonkey]

Originally Posted by starbird

Its mainly because modern video cards only (heh, only) use 24bit colors. there are 256 shades of red green and blue. There just isn't enough colors to make a nice large gradient. Carmack advocated for 64bit color back in 2000 because of this.

There might be ways around it using shaders, which I believe are 32 or 64bit color, but I don't know enough to say.

24 bit is still 8bit per channel (same as 32bit) so there is NO difference between 24 and 32, 24=RGB 32=RGB+A

[Decoman]

*nevermind*

[drtechno]

Look at the sky textures in any modern game. Crysis, Farcry, etc. Theres no banding. Its just poor textures (and ****ty programming).

[Hylander_1314]

One thing too guys, I noticed with my HannsG HG281D monitor, I finally found a proper specs sheet on it, and even though its a pretty screen, it only supports 16million colors.

So even though I have 2 Nvidia 260GTX 896 cards in SLi, I get a 16bit type banding on all my games even the flight sims which makes skinning a biotch.

Unless someone knows a way around this. Even watching dvd movies looks blocky in colors from time to time.

So if anybody knows a way to get a nice picture, I'd appreciate it!

[cherbert]

Glad someone else noticed. Can we post this as a mod request? New Sky Boxes are desperately needed. Noticed the halo/fog around the moon has the same crappy quality.

[java`s revenge]

[Arclight]

Most likely color depth, yes. Try changing it in the config files, to 24 or 32, see if the banding disappears.

Maybe they figured they'd drop 'true color' since a lot of LCDs use 6-bit panels anyway.

[Turm]

Colour banding is one of the reasons I'm still running an old CRT monitor. Banding is almost invisible for me, though I can see it if I specifically look for it.

Hope it can be improved. I might get a new monitor if it can be resolved. I just wish there was a way to run lower, non-native resolutions when necessary without having to look at a blurry edges everywhere. Since I'd want a large LCD, I'd suffer a performance drop in most games due to running at the native resolution (with anything less looking ugly).

Shame there's no way to have the best of both worlds

[Arclight]

So what is the best of the LCD world?

Still running CRT as well.