There's color space and there's color depth. You may be using D-P3 with 8 bit, which is worse (less accurate?) than sRGB with 8 bit. And there's bandwidth. Your monitor may not be able to handle 4k 240fps 16 bit.
There's color space and there's color depth. You may be using D-P3 with 8 bit, which is worse (less accurate?) than sRGB with 8 bit. And there's bandwidth. Your monitor may not be able to handle 4k 240fps 16 bit.
You are right that I have not mentioned this, but indeed wide color gamut monitors should also support 10 bit or better resolution per color component.
Software that does color processing should convert all input pixel formats into BT.2020 linear FP16 color components, do whatever processing is desired and convert from linear FP16 to whatever pixel format is sent directly to the monitor through DisplayPort/HDMI, as the last step.
I have not looked on the market to see how widespread are different kinds of monitor specifications nowadays.
I am using relatively cheap monitors, but not the cheapest, e.g. some common types of Dell monitors. There are more than ten years since my minimal requirements for a monitor have been 4k resolution, 10-bit color components and Display P3 color gamut and 60 Hz at 4k and 10-bit.
So I believe that, especially after a decade, it is easy to satisfy these minimal requirements or better, except that not everybody checks the monitor specifications when they buy one.
> Your monitor may not be able to handle 4k 240fps 16 bit.
10 bits per channel is the common target for higher color depth. The formats with 16 bits per channel are generally for image storage and allowing more bits for downstream transforms to avoid quantization. I don’t even know if there are video cards that would output 16 bits per channel, let alone panels for it.
I don’t think 16 bpc is supported in the standard consumer workflow but I believe 12 bpc is?
> 4k 240fps
As a cinema enthusiast, I say 24 fps ought to be enough for anyone.
These days cheaper monitors with only 8bpc support advertising higher color support use FRC to flicker between different 8-bit colors at a high enough rate to trick the vision receptors to seeing a mix between the two.
Separately, sorry to nitpick, but while wide gamut colors with only eight bits of data have lower resolution than sRGB, that doesn’t make them an inferior option. You might not be able to specify the exact shade but a) your effective accuracy is still greater and b) you trade that for greater range.
Just as an example, assume you have buckets of granularity 1 (sRGB) and 0.5 granularity (wide gamut). With only eight bits you can precisely select any individual bucket of granularity 1, whereas with only eight bits you sometimes miss the intended wide gamut 0.5 precision bucket and hit its neighbor instead (as if you had a granularity of 1 in this specific worst case). That doesn’t make it worse; you just aren’t taking full advantage. On top of that, your range with granularity one is, say, 200 to 800 while your “range” with the wide bucket is 0 to 1000 (just as an example).
There’s a reason photos or graphics saved as eight-bit png or jpeg still manage to look ten times better in a wide gamut profile than in sRGB (on a better-than-sRGB display).