Re: [PATCH] drm/amd/display: Change dither policy for 10 bpc output back to dithering

[Alex Deucher <alexdeucher@gmail.com>]

+ Harry, Alex

On Sat, Mar 21, 2026 at 1:29 AM Mario Kleiner
<mario.kleiner.de@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Commit d5df648ec830 ("drm/amd/display: Change dither policy for 10bpc to
> round") degraded display of 12 bpc color precision output to 10 bpc sinks
> by switching 10 bpc output from dithering to "truncate to 10 bpc".
>
> I don't find the argumentation in that commit convincing, but the
> consequences highly unfortunate, especially for applications that
> require effective > 10 bpc precision output of > 10 bpc framebuffers.
>
> The argument wasn't something strong like "there are hardware design
> defects or limitations which require us to work around broken dithering
> to 10 bpc", or "there are some special use cases which do require
> truncation to 10 bpc", but essentially "at some point in the past we
> used truncation in Polaris/Vega times and it looks like it got
> inadvertently changed for Navi, so let's do that again". I couldn't find
> evidence for that in the git commit logs for this. The commit message also
> acknowledges that using dithering "...makes some sense for FP16...
> ...but not for ARGB2101010 surfaces..."
>
> The problem with this is that it makes fp16 surfaces, and especially
> rgba16 fixed point surfaces, less useful. These are now well
> supported by Mesa 25.3 and later via OpenGL + EGL, Vulkan/WSI, and by
> OSS AMDVLK Vulkan/WSI/display, and also by GNOME 50 mutter under Wayland,
> and they used to provide more than 10 bpc effective precision at the
> output.
>
> Even for 8 or 10 bpc surfaces, the color pipeline behind the framebuffer,
> e.g., gamma tables, CTM, can be used for color correction and will
> benefit from an effective > 10 bpc output precision via dithering,
> retaining some precision that would get lost on the way through the
> pipeline, e.g., due to non-linear gamma functions.
>
> Scientific apps rely on this for > 10 bpc display precision. Truncating
> to 10 bpc, instead of dithering the pipeline internal 12 bpc precision
> down to 10 bpc, causes a serious loss of precision. This also creates the
> undesirable and slightly absurd situation that using a cheap monitor
> with only 8 bpc input and display panel will yield roughly 12 bpc
> precision via dithering from 12 -> 8 bpc, whereas investment into a
> more expensive monitor with 10 bpc input and native 10 bpc display will
> only yield 10 bpc, even if a fp16 or rgb16 framebuffer and/or a properly
> set up color pipeline (gamma tables, CTM's etc. with more than 10 bpc out
> precision) would allow effective 12 bpc precision output.
>
> Therefore this patch proposes reverting that commit and going back to
> dithering down to 10 bpc, consistent with the behaviour for 6 bpc or 8 bpc
> output.
>
> Successfully tested on AMD Polaris DCE 11.2 and Raven Ridge DCN 1.0 with
> a native 10 bpc capable monitor, outputting a RGBA16 unorm framebuffer and
> measuring resulting color precision with a photometer. No apparent visual
> artifacts or problems were observed, and effective precision was measured
> to be 12 bpc again, as expected.
>
> Fixes: d5df648ec830 ("drm/amd/display: Change dither policy for 10bpc to round")
> Signed-off-by: Mario Kleiner <mario.kleiner.de@gmail.com>
> Tested-by: Mario Kleiner <mario.kleiner.de@gmail.com>
> Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
> Cc: Aric Cyr <aric.cyr@amd.com>
> Cc: Anthony Koo <anthony.koo@amd.com>
> Cc: Rodrigo Siqueira <rodrigo.siqueira@amd.com>
> Cc: Krunoslav Kovac <krunoslav.kovac@amd.com>
> Cc: Alex Deucher <alexander.deucher@amd.com>
> ---
>  drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display/dc/core/dc_resource.c | 2 +-
>  1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
>
> diff --git a/drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display/dc/core/dc_resource.c b/drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display/dc/core/dc_resource.c
> index c9fbb64d706a..29db5404c4a0 100644
> --- a/drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display/dc/core/dc_resource.c
> +++ b/drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display/dc/core/dc_resource.c
> @@ -5056,7 +5056,7 @@ void resource_build_bit_depth_reduction_params(struct dc_stream_state *stream,
>                         option = DITHER_OPTION_SPATIAL8;
>                         break;
>                 case COLOR_DEPTH_101010:
> -                       option = DITHER_OPTION_TRUN10;
> +                       option = DITHER_OPTION_SPATIAL10;
>                         break;
>                 default:
>                         option = DITHER_OPTION_DISABLE;
> --
> 2.43.0
>