Visual difference between 16 bit and 32 bit

[Lee_Stricklin]

I don't know if it's because the game is set to my monitor's highest resolution, or if my video driver is whack, but outside of a performance drop on Starship I can't tell the difference between 32 bit and 16 bit. Image hosting thanks to Nexuiz Ninjaz http://pics.nexuizninjaz.com/


32 bit


16 bit



32 bit


16 bit



32 bit


16 bit


Video Settings

[parasti]

You can't have stencil shadows in 16-bit mode.

[Lee_Stricklin]

Stencil shadows? Are those the shadows displayed off of characters? I see those all the time.

[liolak]

most "normal" lcd monitors are not 24bit color capable. so the wider gamut of color being able to be displayed by the 32bit color representation is just lost once sent in the monitor.

by "normal" i mean the monitor that are not the one that imaging proffessionals will buy. i.e. that cost less than 600$

also i dont know if it happens often in nexuiz that theres more color to be displayed than you can fit in 16bit. In anyway, i cant see a difference between 16bit and 32bit either D: , i just use 32bit because it makes me feel more cool :\

[AnArKiSt]

I see a slight difference in detail...

I use 16 bit, because it renders faster(?), and the quality difference isn't much anyway.

[tZork]

The difference on those screenshots is so minimal i suspect your gpu driver is forcing 32 bit mode anyway.

[Ed]

There was a time (pre Geforce256) when 16-bit vs 32-bit would have made a big performance difference. Now it's negligible in a lot of cases. With darkplaces you can see some very horrible things in 16-bit if you do enable some of the realtime lighting options so I would just leave it on 32-bit. Nowadays 16-bit should only be used on old hardware (like 10 years old, 2 years is not old) or troubleshooting horridly broken graphics drivers.

[parasti]

Stencil shadows? Are those the shadows displayed off of characters? I see those all the time.

Stencil shadows are real-time shadows achieved using the stencil buffer. DarkPlaces recently got a different kind of real-time shadows, so called "soft shadows" (shadowmapping), that IIUC do not use stencil buffer. Although, personally I don't see _any_ real-time shadows in 16-bit mode, which kinda makes sense, because if that mode is useful for anything it's probably reduced video memory usage. If you get real-time shadows, then most likely you are _not_ running in 16-bit mode. Can I ask, did you hit "apply immediately" or execute vid_restart after changing the setting? Also, check the console log to see if perhaps the selected video mode was rejected by the driver.

[Lee_Stricklin]

The difference on those screenshots is so minimal i suspect your gpu driver is forcing 32 bit mode anyway.

That's probably what it is, I'll take a closer look at it, though setting the game to 32 bit lowers performance on Starship (the purple map that abuses the crap out of reflections).

[Lee_Stricklin]

Toyed around with my Nvidia settings and that pretty much corrected things (to an extent), but the only visual difference I see is the stencil shadows.