I never realized that you can get such ugly looking graphics, even in 32 bpp. All this time I thought the video card is not using enough precision or something, until I wrote my own software rendering code (calculates lighting and everything else in software).
A white triangle, will look shaded from light gray to dark gray at a specific angle of rotation and mach banding becomes very visible.
I took a screen shot and check out the color values ->
i am not sure what is the default setting for dithering. But what aboyt trying it out by yourself ?
just call glDisable(GL_DITHER) before you call your rendering code and see what happens…
The problem is that you’ve got a pure greyscale going, which limits you to 256 shades of grey at 32bpp. You’d find the same thing if you tried doing a solid red, green or blue.
Wonder when 64/128bpp graphics will be mainstream… Sorry to mention the ‘D’ word, but does anyone know if DirectX9 requires floating point color /display/ formats, or is that just for internal computation?
Not sure about DX9. From the specs of the ATi Radeon 9700 (aka R300) I strongly suspect that the frame buffer is only 10-bits-per-component (32- or 40-bits-per-pixel). The floating-point buffers are only available for internal rendering I think.
It says: “High precision 10-bit per channel frame buffer support”. You’d think if it was genuinely 64-/128-bit FP they’d be shouting from the rooftops about it.
My experience has been that I haven’t noticed anything with dither on 24 bpp. I have yet to try out on this situation (working on other parts)
Even if it counts as 256 shades, it is very much noticeable. I can email you a screenshot if you want. A single value change per band and it looks like 50 or something.
The R300 does floating point in the fragment shader. Displayable framebuffer max res is 10 bits per component (as nutball said), but I think at the sacrifice of alpha to 2 bits (10:10:10:2).
I think there is a fp drawable mode, but not displayable, supposedly for readback (so you can make multipass things or “accelerated nuclear simulation using your GPU” type of thing).
Note that glReadPixels has GL_FLOAT as one of the possible types…
I could swear that D3D 9 required full floating-point frame buffer functionality. I remember the Anandtech article raving about the 9700’s floating-point frame buffer capabilities, so I will assume that it has full-fledged 128-bit floating-point framebuffers.
I remember hearing about a card that had a 10:10:10:2 framebuffer, but I don’t believe it was the Radeon 9700. I thought it was Matrox’s new thing.
Even if the floating-point buffer is internal, that’s fine. You render the entire display into the floating-point buffer, and then use a single pass over the actual framebuffer to do your post-process effects (saturation, gamma correction, etc).