O.K. I had tried a 256 x 256 Grayscale Ramp onto a 256 x 256 Terrain in Vue's Terrain Editor and it did work. But that still doesn't convince me yet that this isn't a re-sampling of 16 Bit to 8 Bit. The ramp I got was still jagged- and while I can hit DIFFUSIVE 4 times at MAX strength to make it look smooth- you can easily do the same thing with 8 bit data as well. I've been able to convert 16 bit data in Photoshop to 8 bit data- going first to 16 BIT RGB data- then taking that to 8 BIT RGB data- and then importing that into the Terrain Editor- with the same results. It actually looks pretty good (see my thread lower down on MEGA Terrains). Keep in mind, smoothing DEGRADES terrain data- if you have lots of interesting features- and you smooth them out- you have something that looks like a semi-melted ice cream. When you import 16 bit Grayscale data into Terragen- no smoothing is required. It looks BOTH detailed AND Smooth. I still think Vue is converting the data to 8 bit- probably in an RGB 8 bit space- splitting the scale and not using the third 8 bit space. But while better-this still introduces noise artifacts from what I've seen.