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Windows 10 defaults to 8-bit color depth automatically.

I've recently configured my Apple Mac Pro to dual-boot with Windows 10.  I'd done this a couple of times before (with a Mac Mini + Win7) and in the past it all went pretty smoothly.  The Mac Pro is a much more powerful machine and offers AMD FirePro D300 GPUs (Display Adapters).  And the D300 is pretty powerful too (or so I thought...)  Its 'Properties' window shows me a wide range of display modes and refresh rates - all of which apparently support 32-bit colour.

BUT... no matter which setting I choose in the Properties dialog, Windows itself invariably reports only 8-bit colours - and to my eyes, the colour palette definitely does look a bit limited. Is this a bug in Windows 10 or is it something to do with the fact that Win10 isn't registered yet on my system? It's genuine Microsoft - but the poor colour performance is the main reason I haven't registered yet.

***Modified Title from: Is Windows 10 limited to 256 colours while unregistered?***

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Hi John,

 

Thank you for writing to Microsoft Community Forums.

 

We can imagine the difficulty you are facing. In order to get clarity, May I know the complete configuration, make and model of the system?

 

In the meantime, we would suggest you to try following methods and check of resolves the issue.

 

Method 1: Rollback the GPU driver.

 

  1. Open Device Manager by searching for the same.

  2. Expand Display adapter.

  3. Right click on the driver and choose Properties.

  4. Click on Driver tab.

  5. Click on Roll back of the option is available and check.

Method 2: Uninstall the re-install the driver for graphics card.

 

  1. Open Device Manager.

  2. Expand Display adapter.

  3. Right click on the driver and choose Uninstall driver.

  4. Make sure to check the box behind Delete the driver software for this device.

  5. Then restart the computer to complete the process.

  6. Power on the system.

  7. Go to Start > Settings > Update & security and click on Check for updates.

  8. Check if the issue persists.

  9. If yes, try installing from the manufacturer website, AMD driver Support and check.

Regards,

Manjunath H
Microsoft Community – Moderator

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Thanks, Manjunath. The machine itself is an Apple Mac Pro which I've configured to dual boot using Apple's 'Boot Camp' utility. It's quite a high-spec computer with a 10-core Intel Xeon E5-2690 CPU (3.0 GHz). It also has dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs. I could elaborate on the spec - but....

Over the weekend I've checked with some other Win10 users and this seems to be a very common problem - in fact AFAICT, concerns about the colour accuracy in Win10 are definitely delaying some users from purchasing it (including me....)

Before I start rolling back drivers etc, would you mind checking this for me an any Win10 machine? You just need to right-click on the desktop and then choose 'Display settings'. Then scroll down a bit and click the option saying 'Advanced display settings' (not the one that says 'Advanced scaling'). This will show you the 'Settings' window that I displayed above. Up to now, every single person I've spoken to has reported it showing a colour depth of just 8-bits (i.e. just 256 colours) and there seems to be no way to set it higher... :-(

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I see the same as you using a Nvidia GeForce 710.

Using their software GPU Control Panel it shows it is currently set to 32bit colour depth.

I would suspect that the windows setting is misrepresenting the colour depth. I have no issues with the way images are displayed.

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I've uploaded some screen snips of an app I use quite frequently under Win7, Win8.1 and now Win10. It's an ancient DOS app which only supports 16 colours (so you'd think it'd be easy to get this one right).

Ignore the window borders and backgrounds and just concentrate on the app itself. If you look at each snip, it's easy to see that 2 of them look pretty similar whereas one (the Win10 one) looks very obviously different.

Now to be fair... I need to say that my Win7 machine and my Win8.1 machine both use NVidia graphics - whereas my Win10 machine uses AMD graphics. So it's entirely possible that that's where the problem lies. But maybe it's also possible that Win7 and Win8.1 are both using 32-bit True Colour, whereas Win10 is just using an 8-bit approximation.

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Looking at the image from Windows 10 it looks like a typical Windows 10 display.

What does a photo look like when displayed by Windows 10, do you see colour detail you would expect. Mine show a colour depth of 24 bit (even though windows Display shows 8 bit) and the details of the image look fine.

Searching the Internet for "windows 10 display 8 bit" shows many questions and some explanations.

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Thanks Neilpzz - I'm a bit snowed-under today but I'll try some photos tomorrow. In the meantime... what graphics adapter is in your PC? Is it NVidia? Or AMD? Or something else?

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I have a Nvidia GeForce 710. I'm wondering if you are just seeing the typical flat display for text that Windows 10 uses (by design).

You can't make it look "pretty" as you could with Windows 7 or 8.

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The text and font stuff isn't such a problem for me - what I'm more concerned about are the differences in colour. I honestly wouldn't pay for a product which claims to support "True Colour" but which can't actually display colours accurately!! :-)

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I'm no expert on this but perhaps you can use the option to Calibrate your display if you see a difference in colours.

Looking again at your screenshots I can see a slight difference in the background colour and text. I have no way to check previous OS displays against Windows 10 so can't do what you have done. But since using Windows 10 on the same hardware as I had Windows 7 (pre 2016) I haven't noticed a difference.

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Okay I've tried some experiments this morning with a 32-bit PNG image and some 24-bit JPGs. And the good news is that photographic images look identical in all 3 OS's. So what can be going on here?? Win10 can reproduce photographic colours correctly but it seems less fussy somehow about non-photographic stuff (window backgrounds or whatever). Does it only use true colour for things that need it and maybe reverts to 8-bit colour elsewhere (e.g. for its own internal window objects?)

I'd have thought the whole point of "true colour" is to look the same everywhere..?

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Last updated May 5, 2024 Views 107,122 Applies to: