#After 24-bit….???
9 messages in this thread
Can anybody tell me what the next step AFTER 24-bit colour cards is? Maybe
an incredible increase in resolution? 32-bit graphics?
Is this being worked on anywhere, and is it worth waiting for?
TIA.
….Seeya – Grant.
Grant,
I am certainly no expert in this area, but from what I understand,
24-bit graphics yield as much as the human eye can see…
Rather than color overkill (32-bit graphics) I would rather see these
chips that will do real-time digital video in 16 million colors.
Of course harddrive controllers and other elements no doubt would have
to be developed to sustain the throughput necessary for any length of
this kind of thing…
Hope to hear from others…
Tim
Tim,
re. real-time 24-bit video, I hear that DMI is comming out with a board
which will play 30 frames/sec from a hard drive. It uses the TI34020
graphics chip & coprocessors along with hardware JPEG. There's also uses a
built-in SCSI II controller for speed…
-Jim
24-bit graphics is really the same as 32-bit graphics, since 32-bit refers
to the usual 8-bits each of red, green, and blue, plus another 8-bits of
"Alpha" the alpha is used for masking and transparency effects, generally,
but is not as standardized as the first 24-bits, so that on macs, amigas
and PCs different software does different things with the alpha channel
including ignoring it completely. What's next? Probably more resolution,
real-time motion, etc. 24-bits is already better than the human eye needs.
Yes, there are 32 bit graphics cards. 24 bits is plenty because that's all
your eyes can distinguish. Another area for future expansion is alpha, or
transparency. Wouldn't it be nice to have 24 bits RGB plus 8 bits of
"see-through-ness?" For some devices such as scanners or video cameras,
it's conceivable they might want to scan with more than 24 bits, in order
to give more leeway when it comes to image-processing the data before or
after the scan. 256 values per RGB might not be precise enough for some
applications. Other future advances will be higher resolution, that is,
pixels per inch on whatever kind of device you're talking about. Moving
that much data around takes a lot of horsepower and memory. The next ten
years will be very exciting.
Thanx to all for replying. I thought as much when several people said our
eyes couldn't go beyond 24-bit, but the tranparency 'alpha' bits I had not
heard of. I guess the people who develop such things can almost say 'Right,
we've done our bit(no pun intended!), now the rest of you have to make
computers faster to handle it.'
…Seeya – Grant.
There you have apparently hit on a key issue. In a conversation with a
company using the Resolver it was pointed out to me that even 24 bit didn't
give what THEY needed, increased range in greyscale. With each gun limited
to 8 bits there are only 256 discrete levels possible. For applications
like radiology what is needed is 12 or 16 bits of range to give the
discrimination needed for the black and white pictures. They would actually
be just as happy with a 12 bit board with NO color, just 4096 shades of
grey.
Higher spacial resolution; less expensive cards; faster graphics
operations; better monitors; less expensive monitors. We're already where
the gfx are better than your eye can see, so from here on in we're talking
finesse.
–Ben