fullscreen support for games

[Matthias Hopf]

On Oct 24, 05 22:09:35 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> > So, the fundamental problem is that on X you can't assume that any
> > particular visual will be available.  Due to the nature of the beast,
> > you *have to be* flexable.  Since that isn't the case on Windows,
> > there's a bit of culture clash.  I suspect that this game is Just Plain
> > Broken(tm).  What would happen if you ran it on Windows system that
> > could *only* do 24-bit?  I suspect it would fail there too.
> 
> I doubt any such system exist, precisely because many games have been

NVidia's Riva128 only supported 15bit (not 16).
I think I remember a (somewhat experimental) hardware that only had
24bit colors (but I think it didn't have any 3D support).

> switching to 16bpp for a long time (gamers are less sensitive to colour
> depth loss than to resolution loss, so lowering colour depth is a handy
> trick when you're overloading the system with other stuff)

Only old cards are framebuffer bandwidth limited. You cannot gain much
bandwidth, if 4 or more textures (+ zBuffer) are used per pixel. The
question will rise again, though, when it comes to HDR rendering (64 or
128 bits per pixel). However, currently these depths are not supported
by X anyway AFAIK.

Matthias

-- 
Matthias Hopf <mhopf at suse.de>       __        __   __
Maxfeldstr. 5 / 90409 Nuernberg    (_   | |  (_   |__         mat at mshopf.de
Phone +49-911-74053-715            __)  |_|  __)  |__  labs   www.mshopf.de