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Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!uunet!mcsun!uknet!edcastle!aiai!richard From: richard@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: 16-colour X server? Message-ID: <7688@skye.ed.ac.uk> Date: 13 Oct 92 15:40:03 GMT References: <7656@skye.ed.ac.uk> <1992Oct13.015735.7298@ntuix.ntu.ac.sg> Sender: news@aiai.ed.ac.uk Organization: HCRC, University of Edinburgh Lines: 24 In article <1992Oct13.015735.7298@ntuix.ntu.ac.sg> eoahmad@ntuix.ntu.ac.sg (Othman Ahmad) writes: >I used to think that 8-bit is too much but when I run the XFree86, it >is so fast that there is no need to speed it up by 2 time. I'm only using >a non cached 386 25 Mhz without 387. The presence of a 387 will make no difference. The speed of the processor isn't very important since the limiting factor is the bandwidth of the stupid PC bus. On a machine with a local bus to the video card performance is fine, but with a vanilla SVGA on the ISA bus it's pretty poor. >In fact 16-bit is the ultimate. There is no need to go any futher. >The 24-bit and 32-bit DACs are wasteful because they do not take into account >human visual perception. Regardless of human perception, there's an advantage in the simplicity of allocating 8 bits each to red, green and blue. And such a 24-bit system doesn't need a 24-bit *DAC* - it has separate 8-bit ones for each colour. -- Richard -- Richard Tobin, Human Communication Research Centre, R.Tobin@ed.ac.uk Edinburgh University.