What exactly is 32-bit truecolor?

Unity Engine
1

Hi, what exactly is 32-bit truecolor in Unity? Is it 32 bits per pixel or 32 bits per channel?
If it’s 32 bits per pixel = 2^24 per RGB = 16777216 possible color combinations (seems like a reasonable number to me).
Now if I’m using 8 bit image format (I assume 8 bits per pixel) = 6 bits per RGB = 2^6 = 64 total possible color combinations
What am I missing here?
How does unity’s pixel formats correspond to Microsoft’s?

Thanks!

2

32 bits per pixel.

Not sure what you mean. If you’re talking about 8-bit PNG files, those are indexed color and have 256 colors, from a 24-bit color palette. They are not used in Unity or any graphics card hardware, and are converted to truecolor or whatever compression format you have selected.

–Eric

3

Most image editors these days default to 32-bit colour, or 8 bits per pixel. This is the same as most desktops’ colour depth: 24-bit RGB and an 8-bit alpha channel.

Unless you have some very specific purpose in mind, all your source art should be 32-bit in colour. Then you can decide how it gets imported into Unity via the compression settings for each texture. Your options are all the GPU-native formats, which are supported in hardware and thus only affect image quality and video memory usage.