Comment by firebot
2 months ago
We really don't anymore.
Back in the late 90s maybe. Gifs and other paletted image formats were popular.
I even experimented with them. I designed various formats for The Palace. The most popular was 20-bit (6,6,6,2:RGBA, also 5,5,5,5; but the lack of color was intense, 15 bits versus 18 is quite a difference). This allowed fairly high color with anti-aliasing -edges that were semi transparent.
We absolutely still need dithering; 24-bit sRGB is not nearly enough for a large monochromatic gradient to not have visible banding without dithering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_rate_control
Your screen likely uses dithering to produce 1-2 LSBs of each color channel of this piece of graphics right now.