Re: [Evolution] Re: [Xpert]S3 Trio 3d

[Jules Bean <jules jellybean co uk>]

On Thu, Nov 07, 2002 at 05:00:24PM +0100, J?rn Christensen wrote:
> Could you explain to me why there's no advantage of 32 bit? It might be
> me, but on Win98 I thought I could tell the difference between a 24bit
> gradient and a 32 bit gradient - or have I fooled myself???

You have fooled yourself.

24 bit is 8 bits red, 8 bits green, 8 bits blue.

32 bit is 8 bits red, 8 bits green, 8 bits blue, 8 bits wasted.

32bit is sometimes used because it is faster, on some chips, to move
things around in 4byte chunks; sometimes it is used because the last 8
bits have some transparency information in; sometimes they have some
other 'metadata' in.  But AFAIK, they never have colour information
in.

Jules