I mentioned already (here and here) that one problem with gamma correct rendering is how we lose prevision for small values, and may run out of it if we didn’t have enough of it. I wrote a quick shader to demonstrate this problem and see how severe it is depending on the number of bits.

Thanks to BeautyPi‘s fantastic tool, ShaderToy, I could put it on line. Here is the live demo with an absurdly low precision format (R5G6B5) so you cannot miss the banding; just press the play button. It displays colors with maximum and low precision, in linear space and gamma space. The lighter vertical line shows the 50% intensity position. You can see the shader and play with the values here.