How to determine what colour depth application is using?

Question

If you set BitsPerPixel="32" in WMAppManifest.xml file you will have 32 bits colour depth in application. The thing is that low cost devices are always using 16 bits, so images bacome choppy. I want to determine what value of BitsPerPixel is used in application. How to do that?

Answer 1

You can get the current SurfaceFormat from the GraphicsDevice like this:

// XNA
game.GraphicsDevice.DisplayMode.Format;

// Silverlight
page.SharedGraphicsDeviceManager.Current.GraphicsDevice.DisplayMode.Format;

This returns SurfaceFormat.Bgr565 for 16-bit color depth and SurfaceFormat.Color for 32-bit color depth.