How important is it to allow users to select from all video modes their hardware supports?

In particular, I'm wondering about color depth and refresh rate. Some games allow you to select from every resolution/color depth/refresh rate combination supported by the hardware, while other games (and game engines) don't expose color depth and/or refresh rate as options.

Selecting color depth and refresh rate automatically and only presenting the user with a list of resolutions has the advantage of simplifying things technically and offering the user a smaller and more comprehensible list of options. Most casual users aren't going to be too concerned with color depth and refresh rate, I would guess.

But, would this alienate other users? Would this be an "I'll uninstall your game instantly if I can't choose the color depth and refresh rate" type of thing?

I personally like a "show all modes" checkbox next to the short list of resolutions. I doubt anyone would want to use 16-bit color anymore, but refresh rate can be a good thing to be able to change.

In the CTR era selecting refresh rate was extremely important to me and I would simply be unable to play such game since I'm very sensitive to refresh rate and my eyes immediately burn below 80Hz. But in LCD era refresh rate is always perfect, the flickering simply does not exist due to the technology of monitors. Completely redundant now.

As for colour depth you could make general option like to set it like 16 or 24 bit (not listed next to each resolution, just a separate option). But I don't think it is important, as long as it is no less than true 24 bit (and don't forget to tell that it is "32bit" not 24bit because most players still believe that 32bit colours exist ).

Agreed. I'd just start everything at native LCD resolution (or at current resolution, which is easier to poll).
If performance is a concern, perhaps changing resolution would make sense, but I'd encourage just pulling up perf by other means (such as halving texture dimensions).
I really don't want to mess with anything less than a full 32bit back buffer as I might need destination-alpha tricks (or perhaps not) - hardware is likely going to pad pixels to 32bit boundaries anyway.

Thanks for the replies.

In the CTR era selecting refresh rate was extremely important to me and I would simply be unable to play such game since I'm very sensitive to refresh rate and my eyes immediately burn below 80Hz. But in LCD era refresh rate is always perfect, the flickering simply does not exist due to the technology of monitors. Completely redundant now.

Hm, that's interesting - I wasn't aware people could be sensitive to refresh rate in that way. That's something to keep in mind.

Regarding 16-bit though, it does seem like that's something that could be left behind at this point.