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Windows Display: 32, 24, and 16 Bit Color Depth

by Dennis Faas, infopackets editor
http://www.infopackets.com

Ever wonder what the difference is between 16 bit, 24 bit, and 32 bit color in your Display Settings?

To the human eye, there is little difference. It is said that the human eye can only distinguish approximately 6 million different colors. 16 bit color is equivalent to 65,536 colors; True Color (also known as 24 bit) can display 16,777,216 colors - which are far more than the eye can detect. So what is the purpose of 32 bit color? Technically, 32 bit color has an additional 8 bits of color used for an Alpha Channel. For the scope of this article, we will not be concerned with such technicality; we only need to know that 32 bit is a larger number than 24 bit, and that the human eye can distinguish less than either of these.

To your computer, however, 16 bit color varies definitively from 24 or 32 bit. In an abstract sense, all three color modes can be compared using an analogy of traffic on a highway. For this example, information sent to the video card will be represented by the traveling cars. The resources of your computer (bandwidth) required to handle this traffic is represented by the highway. A 16 bit highway has only 1 lane of traffic; a 24 bit highway is equivalent to 1.5 lanes, and a 32 bit highway has 2 lanes. It would follow that a greater amount of traffic require more highway to be used.

In the physical world, a video card in 16 bit color mode must work twice as hard to display the same image in 32 bit. Since we can only distinguish 6 million colors at a time, 32 bit color is a waste of precious computer resources.

The truth is, your computer can work much faster in 16 bit color than in 24 or 32 bit color mode. The difference in time to process images is highly noticeable on older computer systems when comparing color depths. I would advise that if you're using 32 bit color as your display setting, change it to 16 bit color. You won't notice any difference, and your computer will process information faster.

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