This driver release supports X screens with screen depths of 30 bits per pixel (10 bits per color component) on NVIDIA Quadro GPUs based on G80 and higher chip architectures. This provides about 1 billion possible colors, allowing for higher color precision and smoother gradients.

When displaying a depth 30 image on a digital flat panel, the color data will be dithered to 8 or 6 bits per pixel, depending on the capabilities of the flat panel. VGA outputs can display the full 10 bit range of colors.

To work reliably, depth 30 requires X.org 7.3 or higher.

NOTE: X servers starting with X.org 7.3 rely on a library called libpixman to perform software rendering. As of this writing, the officially released version of this library will crash when it encouters depth 30 drawables. To be able to run X at this depth, you will need to download, compile, and install the "wide-composite" development branch from the freedesktop.org pixman git repository. Please see the freedesktop.org and git documentation for instructions on how to download and compile development branches.

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.