[Jim Sachs]

The background is done using a "wash". This means that the program tells the video card what color to make the top of the screen, what color to make the bottom, and the card's drivers are responsible for filling in every color in between. Every card we have tested in the past year has generated a smooth wash with no banding, as long as anti-aliasing is turned off. (I haven't tried a G-Force3 yet, but have heard it also works fine.)

To map 32-bit color values into 16-bit color space, the cards use dithering, which simply means that they alternate pixels of the two closest 16-bit colors to form the 32-bit target color. Some drivers have a setting to enable or disable hardware dithering, so make sure it's on if you've got a button for it in your Settings sheet. If anti-aliasing is used (it's only useful for low-res games) then dithering is disabled.