PCX format is commonly used by IBM PC‑compatible computers. Most PC software supports version 5 of PCX format. A standard VGA color palette is used with version 3 files, which do not support custom color palettes.

PCX format supports Bitmap, Grayscale, Indexed Color, and RGB color modes, and does not support alpha channels. PCX supports the RLE compression method. Images can have a bit depth of 1, 4, 8, or 24.