Hi Martin,
I'm trying to figure out how to ask X what color depth it is using...?
I think:
martin@merkaba:~> xdpyinfo | grep -i "depth of root"
depth of root window: 24 planes
but am not completely sure.
This is thinkpad x60 with Debian 6.0.9.
AFAIK the 830GM chipset does not offer any support for hardware
dithering. Whether the panel in the x60 does I do not know, though.
However, what is remarkable is that graphics on a 16 bit(!) screen may
look more pleasing than graphics on a 24 bit screen, at least for such
ancient machines. The reason is that the panel cuts the bitdepth down
from 8 to 6 bits, without any dithering, just by cutting off the LSBs.
However, if you select a 16bpp mode to begin with, some desktop
environments (specifically gnome) apply a dithering of their own, even
though the output is only 5 bit per component.
This is at least what I see here on the IBM R31 and the Fujitsu S6010:
Gnome desktop at 16bpp looks better than the desktop at 8bpp, due to the
lack of hardware dithering.
The X11 intel driver had an option "Dac6Bit" to signal the 6 bit panel
resolution to X (even though the display pipeline operates in 8 bit
mode), but I have never seen this working in the past time. It seems not
to be supported anymore. Probably that's the culprit.
Martin, you should probably test Ville's alm_fixes5 kernel branch, its
support for the 830GM chipset of the X30 is in my experience much better
than that of the drm-intel-nightly or official kernels.
Greetings,
Thomas
_______________________________________________
Intel-gfx mailing list
Intel-gfx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/intel-gfx
