Quote:
Originally Posted by soresu
Arguably there's no point in >10bpc content.
I've seen plenty 8bpc content without banding so it clearly isn't inherent and I doubt that the average human could tell the difference between 10 and 12 bpc content at all.
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The problem is dithering doesn't encode very well. A smooth gradient from Y'=64 to Y'=72 across a 1920x1080 frame is going to have banding in 8-bit without really good dithering that actual frequency-transform compression tends to lose.
And HDR with 8-bit is much harder. Just encoding Rec 2100 content in 8-bit yields a horrible mess.
And it's challenging to detect full 4K detail in SDR for natural images, and in many cases impossible even by expert viewers. HDR is what makes 4K generally worthwhile for natural images. Seeing the difference between carefully selected 4K and 8K HDR moving images is only possible by expert viewers with 20/10 vision and only on a minority of "stress test" clips.
Higher resolutions pay off a lot more for computer games, but that's more about the limitations of anti-aliasing technology and the much greater local contrast of synthetic graphics. Rendering games at 4K and downscaling to 1080p still looks a lot better than native 1080p gaming.