Computer color question for you computer guru's

[Chad Sheets]

OK, I have a choice of "TRUE COLOR 32 BIT", "HIGH COLOR 16 BIT", "256 COLORS", and "16 COLORS".

Whats the diff? What one do I want?

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Always ready to help!
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[Archive]

<font color=blue> What is your processor? how much RAM? Give some more info so that we can give a better judgement. The better color you use the more processing power it will take. Also what size video card?

I run my screen at 1024x768 True Color (32 bit) BUT I have a PIII 550 w/512 megs of Ram. My video card is a Diamond Viper 770 Ultra which has 32 meg of memory itself.

So spit out some more details on the PC #ad

 

[Chad Sheets]

I know its a PII (250 or 350 mhz?)

I remember the number 64.

I got it on 800x600 and 32 bit now. As you can see, I dont know much about this, just enough to screw the system up.

 

[dmurdock]

Chad, you have them ordered from least # of colors to greatest... the lesser number you can use w/o telling a difference should work just fine for your system.

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Always ready to help! (with computer questions!)


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[Chad Sheets]

Neat, thanks guys. I need to brush up on this computer vocab.

 

[Alan Reagan]

Chad, color possibilities are determined by the number of bits:
4 bit will give you 16 colors (2 to the 4th)
8 bit will give you 256 (2 to the 8th).
16 bit will give you 65,536 possibilities and
32 bit will give you 4 billion color possibilities (pretty close to true) #ad
.

Most people get along just fine with the 8 and 16 bit color. If you have a nice displace and software to take advantage of the true color then it is nice to use but otherwise you probably wouldn't notice that you have it.

 

[Cooker]

As stated the higher the color generation the more PC power it takes to run it (processor, ram, video card). For your desktop applications use the 16bit color. You will notice little difference between that and the 32bit, plus you will free up some resources.

When playing games, if you do, like Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament you are able to select the different colors, typically 16 or 32 bit. In the game the difference is noticible but it is most likely not worth the extra resources and slower game play especially with a PII and 64meg of ram.

Summary, I think the 16bit would be just fine for all of the your PC applications. 8bit, in my opinion doesn't generate enough colors

 

[Eventer]

The coloor depth (256, 16-bit, etc. ) that you can run on your computer is wholly dependent upon the video memory that you have in your computer. For example, I have a 5 year old Pentium II with 1MB of video RAM. (I love that word!) According to my computer manual, I can run at 1024x768 at 256 colors, but if I want up to 64K colors, I must drop my resolution to 800x600. If I want to run 16. 7 million colors, I must drop my resolution to 640x480.

All of you with these new fangled computers should not have to worry too much about this. However, do realize that some of the newer computers (HP for example) will use some up system RAM as video RAM. This drops the available system RAM to run your applications.

Your best bet, especially if you are running games, and much less so for application (read office) and browsing software is a dedicated video card.

To answer the original question, choose the minimum that meets your needs for the momemt. You can always change your display properties on the fly, at least in the later operating systems if you are using Windows.

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Lyndon Hendry

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