question about video card performance

[Skylar']

Is it possible to increase video card performance by removing color ? I mean making it only black white? I tried to look in google but there is nothing about it.  

[Alshain]

No, color or greyscale will not affect performance in any noticeable way.

Edited February 28, 2016 by Alshain

[Camacha]

1 hour ago, Skylar' said:

Is it possible to increase video card performance by removing color ? I mean making it only black white? I tried to look in google but there is nothing about it.  

Unfortunately, no. Due to how all the resources are stored in colour and how modern video cards works, showing things in black and white will work by first calculating the colour image and then converting it to black and white. You will only add overhead, not reduce it.

Good methods of increasing performance depend on circumstances, but reducing resolution (final image and textures) and turning off AA are often a good start. What exactly are you trying to do? Maybe we can provide more specific help.

[Skylar']

1 hour ago, Camacha said:

Unfortunately, no. Due to how all the resources are stored in colour and how modern video cards works, showing things in black and white will work by first calculating the colour image and then converting it to black and white. You will only add overhead, not reduce it.

Good methods of increasing performance depend on circumstances, but reducing resolution (final image and textures) and turning off AA are often a good start. What exactly are you trying to do? Maybe we can provide more specific help.

 

tnx that makes sense, nothing specific. I just always wondered that I can cheap and good boost video card by greyscaling output but if u right only way to do it to buy video card created to work on greyscale.

[Camacha]

1 hour ago, Skylar' said:

tnx that makes sense, nothing specific. I just always wondered that I can cheap and good boost video card by greyscaling output but if u right only way to do it to buy video card created to work on greyscale.

There are not video cards created to work on grey scale. Since input files are still coloured, it would require extra overhead, not less.

I also suspect that a specially developed piece of hardware will be so excessively expensive that you could buy a whole truck of normal high-end video cards instead

[Skylar']

22 minutes ago, Camacha said:

There are not video cards created to work on grey scale. Since input files are still coloured, it would require extra overhead, not less.

I also suspect that a specially developed piece of hardware will be so excessively expensive that you could buy a whole truck of normal high-end video cards instead

 

I believe  but theoretically speaking if all files will be created on greyscale, cards, screen projections. that will give something better that the same colored video card?  

I found something they using it for medical proposes x-ray's

http://www.nvidia.com/content/quadro_fx_product_literature/TB-04631-001_v05.pdf

but that's definitely not for gaming

[Camacha]

19 minutes ago, Skylar' said:

I believe  but theoretically speaking if all files will be created on greyscale, cards, screen projections. that will give something better that the same colored video card?

The correct answer is it depends. It is more complex than just the number of colours. Bit depth has a lot to do with the amount of data processed. You could have as much or more data in grey scale than you have in colour. Put simply, you could divide the same grey scale in many more levels, allowing for more detail and complexity. Grey scale could be cheaper and faster to work with, but only when you assume that the grey scale palette is a smaller data set, and smaller in an appropriate sense at that.

Edited February 28, 2016 by Camacha

[Skylar']

3 minutes ago, Camacha said:

The correct answer is it depends. It is more complex than just the number of colours. Bit depth has a lot to do with the amount of data processed. You could have as much or more data in grey scale than you have in colour. Put simply, you could divide the same grey scale in many more levels, allowing for more detail and complexity. Grey scale could be cheaper and faster to work with, but only under specific circumstances.

thnx for knowledge it was real mystery for me  

[Nuke]

say you wanted to do an artsy type game entirely in b&w. you would create all your art and whatnot in formats suited to grayscale data, color formats like dxt1 and 5 would probibly not be used at all (though you might use 5_nm for normal maps). you might as well break out bc4 textures. you are going to get much better grayscale representations for the same memory cost as dxt1. if you do that you might as well break out bc5 for normal maps. or you can speed things up by using the same format for everything. if you use array textures, where you can have any number of single channels of the same type and get a slightly improved performance improvement out of it (texture switching is expensive). most of your maps are going to be single channel. normal maps require 2 channels, but you can easily have once channel for u and another for v and connect the dots in the fragment shader, so an array of bc4s would work great.

up till now you havent really gained anything but a little bit of performance using array textures. when you start writing fragment shaders you will find that your math gets much much more simple. you dont have to handle any color channels separately, just the gray values. you will see almost a 2/3rd drop in flop requirements from your stream processors. so you stand to have a bit of improved rendering performance out of that. you can throw those savings into graphics detail and come out with a rather visually stunning yet efficient game.

however i dont think you can just flip a switch and throw out the color. your game has to be designed from the ground up for b&w rendering.

Edited February 28, 2016 by Nuke