fullscreen support for games

[Nicolas Mailhot]

On Wed, October 26, 2005 16:52, Matthias Hopf wrote:
> On Oct 24, 05 22:09:35 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

>> 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.

16bpp-only games do not exist solely for hardware reasons. A 16bpp game
means all the artwork only needs to be 16bpp which is appealing to lots of
software houses. Till very recently anything higher than 16bpp was the
exception not the norm.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot