NVIDIA GeForce and TITAN cards get 30-bit OpenGL support

Over at SIGGRAPH, NVIDIA announced 30-bit OpenGL support is coming to its GeForce and TITAN series video cards. Previously, customers needed to buy an expensive Quadro card to get 30-bit (10bpc) color support on OpenGL applications but now the consumer-level cards will support this feature too. If you need 30-bit color, you can gain the feature by installing the latest NVIDIA Studio Driver.

Dubbed their Studio Driver: SIGGRAPH Edition, NVIDIA’s latest driver will eliminate the artificial restriction that prevented OpenGL applications from drawing in 30-bit color. For essentially all of the company’s existence, NVIDIA has restricted this feature to their professional visualization Quadro cards in order to create a larger degree of product segmentation between the two product families. With OpenGL (still) widely used for professional content creation applications, this restriction didn’t prevent applications like Photoshop from running on GeForce cards, but it kept true professional users from using it with the full, banding-free precision that the program (and their monitors) were capable of. So for the better part of 20 years, it has been one of the most important practical reasons to get a Quadro card over a GeForce card, as while it’s possible to use 30-bit color elsewhere (e.g. DirectX), it was held back in a very specific scenario that impacted content creators.

The feature is very welcome to anyone working with HDR materials. AMD does not have this distinction between its consumer and professional cards.

Via: AnandTech