I have a Dell 2709W rev 4. I currently run it with a DVI from an Asus 260. I am looking to upgrade my graphics card to something like the 5850. I have been told (read this on [H]ard OCP and some photo forums) that at the moment I will have 8 bit vis DVI but a display port capable card to the monitors dp input would give me 10 bit colour. Tthe monitor is an S-PVA calibrated with a Spyder and used amongst other things for photo editing. Some people claim this (10 bit) is slightly better for certain things, photo wise and suchlike, and some say you can't see the difference. Then people on Hard OCP and other forums are saying that DP gives less input lag ? (for gaming obviously) If these aren't worthy positives, I will consider an Nvidia card which probably won't have DP, which means waiting for Fermi or whatever its called. If its worth using DP I could get an Ati card now ?
it is definatly worth waiting espacially seeing as you have a 260 are not in deparet need of a upgrade
You need a 10-bit display panel to use the 10-bit colors. Also, you need to look at select Quadro's and not gaming GPU's (Radeon/Geforce), to cut cost, these GPU's only output's up to 8-bit colors per channel. My laptop has Display Port powered by a Quadro NVS 160M (8-bit color max per channel), and it shows no advantages over DVI (on my desktop). I use the Dell U2410 display.
I was told the 2709W is a 10 bit panel. U2410 is a 10 bit but it is 8bit plus dithering to get to 10. The Radeon 5 series with DP are supposed to be able to output 10 bit also. Surely if you Quadro can do 8 per channel, then you wouldn't see a difference over DVI unless it was 10 ? Or am I missing something ?
There are no "10 bit" panels (yet). All panels are 8 bit at most. When there's talk about 10 bits usually you're referring to a 10 bit LUT (look-up table). This LUT makes it easier to map the correct colours to use to the 8 bit colour space. Also, I'd be very hard pressed to believe that DisplayPort has any kind of influence on input lag. Input lag is a question of how quickly a given panel and the electronics that process the image data can put that image on the screen. As DisplayPort is a transport standard it's really not part of the equation here. The HD5850 is an excellent card. The only reason I personally would wait for Fermi would be to get the HD5850 cheaper. But each to his own...
