64-Bit Option Unavailable?

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Bellaflica

Bellaflica

Distinguished
Feb 10, 2014
214
0
18,690
Hi Tom's,

I recently built my first PC with a Windows 7 64-bit OS. It is connected to an Asus VG248QE via DVI. All of my hardware and software is up to date.

Windows only gives me the options of 16-bit and 32-bit. Why is 64-bit not an option if I have a 64-bit OS and a brand new computer?
 
Solution
P


There are higher depth colour spaces available, such as 48 bit but there are very few displays that support these colour spaces much less graphics adapters that support them as well.

The typical 32 bit colour space is comprised of 4 8-bit channels. A red channel, a blue channel, a green channel, and an Alpha channel. The R, G, and B channels are self explanatory, they are the primitive colour components of each pixel. The alpha channel is for transparency, and is used to blend multiple images together. The alpha channel is no longer needed past the rasterization stage (where the final...
Sort by date Sort by votes
Z

Zooshooter

Honorable
Feb 8, 2013
339
0
10,960
First off, 16 and 32-bit what? What setting are you trying to change that is only giving you those options? If you're talking about the color settings, then I have news for you. 64-bit refers to the "word" size that Windows uses to pass instructions to the CPU and has nothing to do with the color options available.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
M

mbreslin1954

Distinguished
Nov 27, 2010
1,515
1
20,460
You're confusing two completely different things. An operating system is said to be either 16-bit, 32-bit, or 64-bit, if it is written for 16-bit, 32-bit, or 64-bit hardware and the accompanying hardware (i.e., the CPU hardware registers and internal components of the CPU are equivalently 16-bit, 32-bit, or 64-bit). The main feature of the CPU is that the instruction set is 16, 32, or 64-bit.

However, what you are referring to with regards to your monitor is the color depth of the pixels. For instance, if you had one-bit color, each pixel would be represented by one bit, it would either be on or off, white or black (early monitors were exactly this, one color).

If each pixel, or picture element, can store 8-bits of data for each dot on the screen, then you can have 8-bit color, or each pixel can be one of 256 different colors (2 to the 8th power = 256).

16-bit color means there is a 16-bit register behind each on-screen pixel, meaning each pixel can be one of 65,536 different colors (2 to the 16th power).

24-bit screen color means that there are 24-bits of color data for each pixel, providing for 16, 777,216 different colors (2 to the 24th power).
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
P

Pinhedd

Champion
Aug 7, 2007
10,342
20
56,965


There are higher depth colour spaces available, such as 48 bit but there are very few displays that support these colour spaces much less graphics adapters that support them as well.

The typical 32 bit colour space is comprised of 4 8-bit channels. A red channel, a blue channel, a green channel, and an Alpha channel. The R, G, and B channels are self explanatory, they are the primitive colour components of each pixel. The alpha channel is for transparency, and is used to blend multiple images together. The alpha channel is no longer needed past the rasterization stage (where the final image to be displayed is produced) so the image sent to your display is typically 24 bits, broken down into 3 8-bit channels, one for red, one for blue, and one for green. 24 bit and 32 bit colour depths are generally used interchangeably, they refer to the same thing.

16 bit colour depths are comprised of the same three channels, but in a 5-6-5 arrangement. The human eye is more sensitive to Green than other colours, so the green channel is given 6 bits while the red and blue are given only 5.

8 bit colour depths are entirely different. Rather than encoding each pixel as a triple of intensities, each pixel is a value between 0 and 255 which is indexed against a pallet of intensities. Thus, an 8 bit image can reproduce all of the same colours as 16 and 24 bit colour depths (depending on the capabilities of the hardware) but only up to 255 different colours in each pallet.

Some professional displays (high end IPS panels) and professional graphics hardware (AMD FirePro and NVidia Quadro) support 10-bit colour channels for professional applications such as Adobe Photoshop.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Solution
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom