CIE XY DMX Profiles are a mighty tool for controlling your fixture.
The values are very precise — small changes in x or y can cause noticeable color shifts.
Each coordinate goes from 0.0000 to 0.8000 sometimes even to 0.8500.
In pro lighting, even a 0.001 shift in XY can be visible.
8bit with 256 steps can't represent that accurately. You'll get issues like
You'd see visible “stepping” when fading between white points
Colors wouldn’t match exactly between fixtures
Very hard to hit exact CCT targets like D65 (0.3127, 0.3290) or neutral white
In 16bit Mode you have 65536 steps that allows you to precisely display the XY coordinates so you'll always match the color you intend to use.
To assure you get the best possible result on set we are not officially supporting XY 8bit profiles in our database.
You can always build your own 8bit XY User Custom Profile and it will do the job - but we recommend going with 16bit XY profiles for performance reasons.