8 Bit Color only problem

[Lil Rico]

I overclocked my monitor not to long ago and as i was overclocking i notice that my overclock says True Color (32 Bit) 75hertz but in windows 10 Display information it says 8 Bit and i'm trying to get the most out of my monitor and if this is holding me back anyway i'd like to fix it or if its a help in gaming in anyway.

[Glenwing]

8 bits per channel in an RGBA system (like Windows) = 32 bits per pixel

 

Everything is correct.

 

This is exactly why it is bad practice to say "8 bit" or "32 bit" color depth, but rather 8 bpc (bits per channel) or 32 bpp (bits per pixel).

[NelizMastr]

If it was actually 8bpp it would only have 256 colors, like, y'know back in the Windows 3.x and 95 days.

[Lil Rico]

So this wont affect gaming in anyway shape or form?

[mariushm]

No, it's the normal way.

 

Like everyone says, your video card can create 256 shades (brightness levels) of red, green and blue. In order to send a value between 0 and 255, you need an 8 bit number , so in order to send 3 values, the video card needs to send 24 bits of information to the monitor.

The other 8 bits are used by games for alpha blending, basically transparency. It tells the video card that something in the image (like a crate, or whatever) is this much transparent, showing up what's behind it by some percentage, which would be again a value between 0 and 255.

 

So while the video card will send 24 bits for each pixel to the monitor (because the monitor doesn't care about transparency of objects, the monitor only draws pixels), you see in Windows in the driver there 32 bits because that tells you the video card is capable of true color (24 bits) + 8 bits of transparency. It was supposed to make the video card more attractive, back when there were cards that were only 16 bit (like Voodoo cards), which were only capable of showing around 65 thousand different colors on the monitor.

 

There are monitors which are 10 bit per color, which means they can have up to 1024 levels for each red, green and blue but yours probably isn't.

[Lil Rico]

Yeah I doubt mine monitor has 10 bit per color but I appreciate the information cause I was very confused.