This driver release supports X screens with screen depths of 30 bits per pixel (10 bits per color component). This provides about 1 billion possible colors, allowing for higher color precision and smoother gradients.

When displaying a depth 30 image, the color data may be dithered to lower bit depths, depending on the capabilities of the display device and how it is connected to the GPU. Some devices connected via analog VGA or DisplayPort can display the full 10 bit range of colors. Devices connected via DVI or HDMI, as well as laptop internal panels connected via LVDS, will be dithered to 8 or 6 bits per component by default. Experimental 10 bits per component HDMI support can be enabled by loading the nvidia-modeset module with the parameter hdmi_deepcolor=1.

To work reliably, depth 30 requires pixman 0.11.6 or higher.

In addition to the above software requirements, many X applications and toolkits do not understand depth 30 visuals as of this writing. Some programs may work correctly, some may work but display incorrect colors, and some may simply fail to run. In particular, many OpenGL applications request 8 bits of alpha when searching for FBConfigs. Since depth 30 visuals have only 2 bits of alpha, no suitable FBConfigs will be found and such applications will fail to start.