GNOME's Mutter Working On "Max BPC" Handling To Deal With Monitor Issues

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME's Mutter Working On "Max BPC" Handling To Deal With Monitor Issues

GNOME developers are working on supporting the Linux KMS "Max BPC" connector property that is supported by some of the Direct Rendering Manager drivers for limiting the maximum bits per color permitted. In turn properly supporting this setting can take care of monitor issues seen on some systems where the monitor may randomly flicker or have other issues unless otherwise lowering the refresh rate or resolution...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-WIP-Max-BPC

[Vorpal]

Are we going to see a return of a drop down of color depth? Probably not, but suddenly I'm getting a weird sort of nostalgia for the color depth selection in windows 95 and other systems of that vintage. If I recall correctly: 256 colors, 16 bit (HighColor) and 24 bit (TrueColor).

[MrCooper]

Fun fact: the C in bpc stands for component, not colour.

Are we going to see a return of a drop down of color depth? Probably not, but suddenly I'm getting a weird sort of nostalgia for the color depth selection in windows 95 and other systems of that vintage. If I recall correctly: 256 colors, 16 bit (HighColor) and 24 bit (TrueColor).

This is not the same thing as colour depth, and there’s no simple correlation between the two things. A DisplayPort / HDMI link can require bpc >= 10 to transmit all output colour values correctly, even at 8 bpp colour depth.

[Hibbelharry]

Funnily I never realized those color depth dropdowns are gone but you are right which made me grin. I still remember me in my early PC days (486 with cirrus logic graphics) noticing a heavy slowdown when setting windows 3.1 to 256 colors instead of 16 at the same screen resolution, I think it was 800x600. Looks were a bit nicer but I remember me going back to 16 colors until I started using Windows95 on my next PC, which didn't suffer that much from switching to higher bit depths. That one just booted for minutes before being usable, it was easily possible to have a 2 mins startup sound having finished before you might touch it's mouse and see no reaction....

[arun54321]

Hope they add colour range support to mutter, limited vs full range like KDE.

[brent]

Yeah, color range is important, too. It's misdetected on many displays. They may have a flaky EDID, but you can't really change that.

[Vorpal]

Hope they add colour range support to mutter, limited vs full range like KDE.

It's Gnome. They are not going to give you an option unless they absolutely have to. Because Gnome devs...