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[Edit: This side discussion has been split off from topic AMC Gremlin] Investigating further... Here is a comparison of displacement effects: First with a Gradient Material set to transition from RGB 128 to RGB 129 and Displacement set to 100000% Second is that gradient rendered to a TGA and used as a Displacement map Third is that gradient rendered to an OpenEXR and used as a Displacement map The Material is able to calculate an exact value for every pixel between the 128 and the 129 levels, creating a perfectly smooth slope. The TGA map, as expected, has one stair step from 128 to 129 The EXR has 8 steps. EXR uses a 16 bit floating point format to store values, but it maps our 0-255 range for black to white to -1.0 to +1.0. From what I read about 16-bit floating point numbers, there 1024 possible values between 0 and 1 (and thus, 2048 between -1 and +1) which matches the result above , with 8 steps between our 128 and 129 gray values. So it seems that A:M is capable of rendering finer displacements, but EXR doesn't store the finer values needed. According to OpenEXR docs, EXR can have 32-bit floating point data. Maybe there is an easy way to get A:M to write those?

Edit: the side discussion of displacement effects has been split off into its own topic at...

The server is not down... The store was for a bit but it's fixed now. The short version of the problem. The store uses a different version of the php and I did not know that because of the way this version php loads the version php uses a different configuration file than the standard version and I did not make the needed changes in the correct file sorry.