Radeon 10 000 (R300) to implement 128-bit colour

LAST YEAR we mentioned here that future generations of 3D accelerators will need higher precision colour than 32-bit. We were also pleased to see John Carmack creator of all Dooms and Quakes agree with us and ask for the same thing for the upcoming title Doom 3.

We have now learned that ATI's Radeon 10,000 will be first chip on the market to implement 128-bit colour precision.

ATI did a famous press release in 'god we are good' style claiming Carmak had said how good the R300 is and we all know that Carmak wanted extra colour depth to be able to have its all manner of fancy effects in Doom 3.

According to our sources, the 128-bit implementation will make multitexturing applications look better and you will be able to have 32-bits per colour. This is amazing since it enables you to have 16.7 milion combnations per colour. In current 32-bit color you just have 8 pixels per colour, giving just 256 variations of colors.

128-bit precision should be part of the DX 9 specification and if you want your hardware to be DX 9 compatible you need to have this precision inside. This leads us to the conclusion that Nvidia NV30 will also have support for 128-bit floating point precision.

128-bit floating point colour will bring more cinematic reality in effects used in games and everything will look lovely, we're told. µ