Do most of you use high color or true color? After I defragged today and rebooted my settings were all messed up and I can't remember which one I used or why it makes a difference. :-)

I use True Colour (32-bits). 16-bit High Colour produces unpleasant banding effects on gradients and the like. You'll also have problems with alpha channels in Poser when using 16-bit colour.

True color at 1024/768 mac

"Hi-color" is 16-bit color (about 32,000 colors, 64,000 with some cards), you should really use "True-Color", 16.8 Million colors, also known as 24 or 32 bit color, which is genreally taken to be about as many as the eye can see. If you use Hi-Color there are about 16 and a half million colors you can't see on your computer. Incidently, 24 and 32-bit color actually have the same numbers of shades, 32 -bit just writes to the screen faster. Back in the olden days, when covered wagons roamed the West, we had 8-bit color, still seen in GIF files, going back even further we had 16-color (4-bit) EGA, or 4-color CGA, or even monochrome, Gee!

Thanks for the info. I wondered about the 24 and 32 bit thing. I don't have the option for 32 bit and thought I might be missing out on something. LOL

in some games where the computer is being pushed to it's limits trying to keep a smooth frame rate..reducing to 16bit can make things a tiny bit easier on the system/vid card...likewise some games have a preference for running in 16bit,it can be a workaround for sometimes glitchy software or compatability issues...this is all games tho where "real time" is all important... for graphics/3d/surfing/whatever...crank whatever card you have as high as it'll go..if there is a performance hit working in these areas it'll be small enough that you'll never notice it..and if you do,you have much bigger problems to address and upgrade out of first...there's no sense in paying for a video card or other equipment and then depriving yourself of it's full capabilities[whatever they might be]

The prefered order is: 32-bit 16-bit THEN 24-bit 24-bit is horribly ineffecient and slow. Unless you really need to utilize alpha-channels (which I do normally), I would keep it at 16-bit and ignore the banding. Are you using a somewhat dated card? If not, there may be something wrong with your installation. -Tim

32 bit True COlour at 1152 x 864, on a GeForce4 Ti 4200.