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[murray]

What are most users doing for JRVR, 8bit or 10bit?
I would really like to set my 3080 to 10bit but as I have two displays connected to my HTPC one allows 10bit and the other only 8bit which restricts me to 8bit on both displays. I know madshi always said 8bit with good dithering was always better on madvr, but I wonder if things have changed now we are on JRVR. It would be great if Hendrik could advise on this dilemma.

[BryanC]

I'm not Hendrik but 10-bit simply means there is more data available for color encoding so it should have a higher theoretical quality.

I'm not exactly sure what madshi meant by his comment out of context, but I'm assuming that's a knock on cheap consumer displays and projectors that are designed for television SDR content. If you've got a real HDR display that can get bright enough (>1000 nits) to render HDR properly, I don't see how a well-dithered 8-bit stream would outperform 10-bit. All it means is more data for better color accuracy.

If you've got a cheap HDR panel that can't get bright enough in HDR mode then tonemapped 8-bit will probably look better, yes.

[mattkhan]

The statement was saying that there is an imperceptible increase in noise assuming a correctly dithered output so that there is no practical benefit at the output stage to a higher bit depth in itself

[FenceMan]

Jim from Lumagen claims the same thing, that the Lumagen dithering is so good that 8 bit is enough.  In their case I think they don't / can't do 10 bit so I don't buy it.

[Hendrik]

If you have a proper 10-bit display it should be fine to use 10-bit. If you are not sure, just use 8-bit.
I would always recommend to verify that it processes 10-bit properly by using something like a 10-bit or 16-bit greyscale ramp and check for banding.

[mattkhan]

Jim from Lumagen claims the same thing, that the Lumagen dithering is so good that 8 bit is enough.  In their case I think they don't / can't do 10 bit so I don't buy it.

You can test it yourself in madvr, as far as I recall it's a fair statement. People always believe bigger is better though whether it makes a difference or not.

[murray]

If you have a proper 10-bit display it should be fine to use 10-bit. If you are not sure, just use 8-bit.
I would always recommend to verify that it processes 10-bit properly by using something like a 10-bit or 16-bit greyscale ramp and check for banding.

Fair enough and thank you. Is Blue Noise considered the best dithering in JRVR when using 8bit? I always though Ordered dithering was one of the highest.

[haasn]

Fair enough and thank you. Is Blue Noise considered the best dithering in JRVR when using 8bit? I always though Ordered dithering was one of the highest.

Blue noise is definitely higher quality than ordered dither. As for 10 vs 8 bit, as others have pointed out, the only difference is an increase in noise threshold. If you can't see the noise from 8-bit dithering, then it's fine. But in theory it should be visible on some patterns, as it's still technically above the human JND threshold, especially in HDR or wide gamut configurations.

I wouldn't sleep over always dithering to 8-bit, though. Also note that enabling the option in JRVR should only be an issue if your GPU driver is bugged, as normally the driver will correctly dither down to the effective monitor bit-depth no matter what depth you configure the backbuffer to.