Just looking ahead...

[Baldy's Boss]

...apologies if it's too far ahead...

what would be the next implementable stage beyond 32bpp?

Would it be 64bpp,or 128bpp,or something else?

[Eddy Arfik]

I think you're confusing bpp (colour depth) with px (resolution). No monitor or video card is capable of anything higher than 32bpp with the exception of extremely high end CGI systems (the kind used in major Hollywood productions). Even then it is downsampled to 32bpp before release, the higher colour depth is only used to reduce artifacts during the editing process. As for the resolution of in-game sprites, the standard zoom are 64px, 4x zoom is 256px, which is already enough to get incredibly detailed graphics. I can't see any reason to increase this further, we don't need 8x zoom in-game. What is lacking at the moment is artists with the skills and time to make graphics that take full advantage of these possibilities, not any kind of technical limits on what can be implemented.

[Eddi]

32bpp is already orders of magnitude higher than the human brain can actually distinguish. there is absolutely no point in going higher than that.

the human eye/brain can distinguish about 1 million colours, 24bpp can display 16 million colours. 32bpp is the same, with added trickery to achieve transparent overlays.