Suggestions on displaying 1.1 Billion Colors

[dondean]

I'm trying to display 1.1 billion colors on my system.
I just purchased a Dell UltraSharp U2413 monitor.
When used with a full 10-bit workflow and compatible 10-bit graphics card, it is supposed to display 1.1 billion out of 4.4 trillion total colors.

I have an HP Pavilion HPE h8-1234 Desktop PC that came with a AMD Radeon 7450 graphics card. The card has two connections on it:
1. HDMI 1.4a with max resolution 1920x1200 with Deep Color and xvYCC wide gamut support and also a
2. Dual-link DVI with HDCP max resolution 2560x1600

I bought a new High Speed HDMI Cable to support Deep Color and connected this to the monitor and the graphics card and set the monitor input as HDMI.
I have Windows 7 Professional, using the 64-bit system, with 24 Gig of RAM
I disabled the Windows 7 Aero Desktop by selecting a Basic Windows Desktop.

To test things, I opened PSP X6 and created two test files.
A 16-bit RGB color image at 900px wide and 400px high .
Then used the 'Gradient' tool to fill it with a gray scale gradient going from RGB 64/64/64 to RGB 96/96/96 (left to right).
I saved the image as a 16-bit TIFF file.
I repeated this and created an 8-bit TIFF file.
I then reopened both images in PSP X6 to compare them.

They both displayed 33 distinguishable vertical bands of gray across the image. I was expecting the 16-bit TIFF image to display as a smooth gradient rather than as bands.

Is there an error in my thinking or my process?
Is there something else I need to do
Any suggestion?
Thanks.

[hartpaul]

I could be wrong, but any image displayed on a computer screen is a bit mapped image in Ram. It is not a Tiff or a jpg or a png, until you decide to save it as such when the restrictions of that format will be imposed in the saved image.
Secondly even if your display can show just 64 million colours ( tif) the human eye can only see about 10 million of those. A jpg is capable of showing 16 million colours so even some of those cannot be seen or differentiated by the eye.

[Zacabeb]

The Windows desktop and subsequently anything that runs on it is probably still rendering in sRGB at 8 bits per channel. Even if you could set the desktop to a higher color depth, any software and the APIs used by it would need to be built savvy of higher bit depths and color spaces other than sRGB, or they would be converted to the higher depth or color space but not benefit from it.

The higher bit depth and xvYCC support in the HDMI output of the graphics card may be related mostly to video overlay functionality, where those features are most likely to see use.

[dondean]

Thanks for the input.
I realize the limitations of how many colors the human eye can see and also that there could be other things in my system interfering with the display of 1 billion colors.
But what I was hopping to do was to eliminate the banding that you see when you create a graduated fill.
This is not a major concern, but since I might be able to do this, I wanted to try.

Any suggestions on what I might check in my Windows system to see if it is set to support the DEEP color mode?