32-bit color is fine, as long as you use more than 8 bits per channel (with 8 left over for padding). If you use 10 bits per channel, with 2 bits left over, that's enough to eliminate color banding effects, and indeed has been in use for a while now.

As for Crysis, they optimized that by betting that single-core CPU speeds would continue to increase significantly, which didn't happen. Instead CPUs became multi-core, and it wasn't optimized for that.

Watch the video I linked. GPU at 98-99% while no cores go very high.

I was obviously referring to situations where you are GPU capped and the game is not designed in such a way that would not get you scalable performance even on a card from 3077.

Well, yes and no. 16-bit color on Voodoo was a weird gimmick, since some of it was done in 32-bit then dithered down, if memory serves. It was certainly much better in terms of banding than 16-bit color on Nvidia, back then.

Just because a GPU is reporting 99% usage, that doesn't mean the engine is fully utilizing its capabilities. I can write a spinning triangle demo that can eat up 99% of your GPU if you want. Does the low hanging fruit have ray-tracing enabled? :P

Then a rabbi enters as well and asks "Hi guys, have you played The Shivah". One of the others say "Hey, that is another low hanging fruit!"

...And the four laughed merriily.

The first game where it blew my mind was playing Jane's Fleet Commander.

I can remember firing it up and my little ships looked like block toys. "Hey, where are the gorgeous detailed machines of war skirting over lush ocean waves I saw in all the magazine reviews?" (magazine is like a paper forum that you can't write in - well, you can but the editors won't hear you) I thought...

Enter the 32bit color setting and suddenly I was watching my beautiful little ships sinking below those waves under barrage after barrage of surface to surface missle fire. Glorious days ;)