Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2017 September 21

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September 21

Performance increase by reducing colour depth from 16- to 8-bit

I have a Wyse V90L thin client from ~10 years ago. It has a VIA Eden 800 MHz CPU, a VIA CN700 2D/3D graphics chipset and 1 GB 533 MHz DDR2 RAM (-32 MB for graphics). I want to use it for a homemade teleprompter and have installed a lightweight version of Linux called antiX. I was thinking I could improve performance by reducing colour depth from 16- to 8-bit but some guy on the Internet said that I shouldn't expect that. Are they correct? Will colour depth affect anything the CPU does or only the GPU? Will it help the text to scroll more smoothly on the screen? Will increasing the RAM assigned to video improve the smooth scrolling of text? --178.170.142.117 (talk) 21:17, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

You get the best performance when you set Linux to use the same resolution and color depth that your hardware is fastest at. According to http://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/wyse/vx0/WyseV90LE.shtml for your hardware that's 1280 x 1024 x 32bits.

BTW, I have found that Tiny Core Linux performs faster than antiX, but I was not testing on a Wyse V90L. You might want to give it a try. --Guy Macon (talk) 01:01, 22 September 2017 (UTC)