The core issue everyone hits is that most “8-bit vs 10-bit” headaches are actually bandwidth ceiling problems wearing a color disguise. At 2560×1440 @ 240Hz, uncompressed RGB 8-bit/4:4:4 clocks in around 13.1 Gbps per lane over DisplayPort, so a DP 1.4 link (41.3 Gbps raw, ~32.4 Gbps usable after overhead) handles it fine. Crank it to 10-bit and you’re at ~17.5 Gbps per lane, which blows past what the usable link budget comfortably supports without invoking DSC. Here’s the tell: if your 10-bit mode suddenly drops to 120Hz or flickers into a black screen on boot, that’s not a color calibration bug — that’s the scaler either silently falling back to DSC (which a lot of cheap panel drivers mishandle) or hitting the PHY bandwidth wall and failing the link training. The worst offender is DSC being toggled on at the GPU driver level while the monitor scaler ALSO wants to compress — double compression on the same signal creates the corruption and artifacting people report as “color banding that wasn’t there at 8-bit.” Disable DSC in NVIDIA Control Panel / AMD Adrenalin first, not last.
For root-cause debugging, don’t chase the software settings before nailing down the physical layer.
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