Speed Gains From 8 Bit Imagery?

[GregSmith]

There are more than a few image manipulation and animation programs available on the market today. Most produce images with 24 or 32 bit palettes by default. In the old days, all games were 256 colors or less. Is this such an issue today, (aside from producing games for pocket PC), with all the cheap memory, fast graphics cards and fast processors?

Greg Smith

[makslane]

Regardless the image color depth, all image are converted to an internal image format. This format is optimized to best performance in low end devices.