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igo95862

Member

Registered: 2018-05-01

Posts: 6

Anyone here used 10 bit color monitor?

I recently got my hands on a 10 bit 4K monitor and I was testing it out.

First of all, it seems like the 10 bit color support is very recent. Xorg got support in 1.20 which released in May 2018. Windows still does not have support.

Used the videos found in this github repo https://github.com/jursonovicst/gradient . The left side of black-white bar is the easiest to spot the difference. Don't use PNG images from there as PNG only supports 8 bits color channels.

My GPU is one of the AMD Polaris cards.

First of all Xorg needs to be configured manually to display 30 bit color palette. However, it seems some applications will interpolate the output to 10 bits even if the Xorg still only outputs 8 bits. Dragon Player and ffplay seems to do that but VLC does not.

This is the xorg config I used:

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier             "Monitor0"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier             "Device0"
    Driver                 "amdgpu"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier             "Screen0" 
    Device                 "Device0"
    Monitor                "Monitor0"
    DefaultDepth           30
    SubSection             "Display"
        Depth              30
    EndSubSection
EndSection

After putting that config and restarting Xorg VLC started also displaying smooth gradients for 10 bit stripes. However, some stuff got broken such as KDE Plasma server side window decorators.

Anyone else had experience with 10 bit monitors? I just wanted to share my experience. Maybe there is a point of creating an article on the wiki on how to setup 10 bit colors just like there is article on HiDPI displays

Last edited by igo95862 (2018-10-06 06:43:19)