What color bit depth does games use?

[Teletha]

Hi i wonder if its worth lowering from RGB to YCbCr422 to be able to have more bandwidth for 10 and 12 bit color on the TV for games. but does games even have higher than 8bit color depth? 

[Motifator]

4:4 will do better on a TV, 4:2 does not have as much IQ range. That TV probably doesn't natively render 10-bit or 12-bit, most likely an 8-bit that uses FRC if it can't do 4:4:4.

There are games that do 10-bit, but not a whole lot.

[Teletha]

9 minutes ago, Motifator said:

4:4 will do better on a TV, 4:2 does not have as much IQ range. That TV probably doesn't natively render 10-bit or 12-bit, most likely an 8-bit that uses FRC if it can't do 4:4:4.

There are games that do 10-bit, but not a whole lot.

in the nvidia panel it has 420, 444, and 422 and RGB. but if i run 444 i cant run in 10bit there's no bandwidth in 4k 60hz so i have to do 422 if i want higher than 8 bit. but if there is no 8bit games i was thinking of (Vampyr) then the best is to run in RGB 

[Motifator]

I'm %99 sure you're seeing things in at least 8-bit with that TV. It's likely a VA or IPS panel that is natively 8-bit. So regardless of whether you're running 4:4:2 or RGB, it's still rendering in 8-bit. If it is however indeed a native 10-bit panel, then yes, it might do better in 10-bit but I'm not sure if it can do that without 4:4 chroma. Maybe run 4:4:4 8-bit, because it's a TV.

Unless you have to use the TV, I'd use the monitors you got. They'd fare better.

[Glenwing]

4:2:2 chroma subsampling removes half the color information from the image, so I don't really see the point of doing that just to get 10 bpc color depth.

[Teletha]

2 hours ago, Glenwing said:

4:2:2 chroma subsampling removes half the color information from the image, so I don't really see the point of doing that just to get 10 bpc color depth.

i see so in the end its best with running rgb if you can't do 444? 

[Glenwing]

1 hour ago, RaW D Coy said:

i see so in the end its best with running rgb if you can't do 444? 

RGB is the same as 4:4:4 from a technical perspective, generally RGB is a better choice for computers since it's the native color format of GPU-generated images. If you use YCbCr it's assumed that it's a TV and sometimes that can lead to other settings being "optimized" for TVs automatically, like full-range color being locked off.