Who needs 24 bit colors

[Kurt Akeley]

perhaps the real point here is that 8 bit per component framebuffers
can be used to CREATE high quality images.  it is much more convenient
to do blending and shading arithmetic in a 3-component linear space than
it is in a dithered space.  this is attested to by the existance of
gamma correction, which simply allows calculations such as antialiasing
to operate with linear arithmetic.

-- kurt