The subject for this message is terribly misleading....

Regards,
Michael
GPG: 96A8 B38A 728A 577D 724D 60E5 F855 53EC B36D 4CDD

On 2017-10-20 12:01 PM, Helmut Jarausch wrote:

I'm considering buying a new monitor (and graphics card) which supports 10 bits per color channel.
Will Gimp on a Linux machine (X11) support this now or in the near future. Or is it just waste of money to buy a monitor with more than 8 bits/color channel?

GIMP is moving towards higher colour depth. Would a high bit depth monitor be worth it? That would depend on your use case(s). Is GIMP the only program you would run that would benefit from a high bit depth monitor? Do you run other programs that would benefit from such a monitor? Will your computers graphical environment (aka. desktop) support full use of a high bit depth monitor?

Cheers!

Kevin.

http://www.ve3syb.ca/           |"Nerds make the shiny things that distract
Owner of Elecraft K2 #2172      | the mouth-breathers, and that's why we're
                                 | powerful!"
#include  |             --Chris Hardwick

On Fri, 2017-10-20 at 12:30 -0400, Kevin Cozens wrote:

On 2017-10-20 12:01 PM, Helmut Jarausch wrote:

I'm considering buying a new monitor (and graphics card) which supports
10 bits per color channel.
Will Gimp on a Linux machine (X11) support this now or in the near future.
Or is it just waste of money to buy a monitor with more than 8 bits/color channel?

I have a monitor with a wide gamut, which is awesome. And i also have one that does 10 bit colour. Last time i tried running X11 in 10bpc instead of 8bpc i found that too much broke outside gimp's image window - including the gimp toolbox and docks and all window decorations (for all windows, not just gimp), as something (libgtk and the desktop compositor both i think) was still trying to use 8 bits for transparency when 10 bits means a 32 bit word is (10R, 10G, 10B, 2 alpha). But it worked fine in Windows, and my guess is that if it doesn't work already it'll work in the gtk3 version of gimp planned some times after gimp 2.10.

i could repeat the experiment maybe in the next few days if it'd be of use.

Liam

Liam Quin, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Staff contact for Verifiable Claims WG, SVG WG, XQuery WG

Web slave for http://www.fromoldbooks.org/

On 10/20/2017 12:30 PM, Kevin Cozens wrote:

GIMP is moving towards higher colour depth. Would a high bit depth monitor be worth it? That would depend on your use case(s). Is GIMP the only program you would run that would benefit from a high bit depth monitor? Do you run other programs that would benefit from such a monitor? Will your computers graphical environment (aka. desktop) support full use of a high bit depth monitor?

GIMP 2.9/2.10 does process images at 32-bit floating point. But at this point the GIMP code that sends the image to the screen for display works at 8-bit integer, using "CAIRO_FORMAT_ARGB32".

Cairo does provide "CAIRO_FORMAT_RGB30 -> like RGB24 but with 10bpc. (Since 1.12)".

Which if any editing programs use CAIRO_FORMAT_RGB30? How would it impact performance if GIMP started using CAIRO_FORMAT_RGB30?

There's an open darktable issue on the topic: https://redmine.darktable.org/issues/10197

Over on the ArgyllCMS mailing list is a nice discussion of 30-bit displays, distinguishing between calibration and profiling: https://www.freelists.org/post/argyllcms/Argyll-and-30bit-colors,3

Not every free/libre image editor uses cairo to send images to the screen. Can Krita make use of 10-bit monitor displays, using whatever it is that qt apps use?

Will cairo still be used if/once Linux switches over to Wayland?

Elle