In this paper, the performance of truncated gray-coded bit-plane matching (T-GCBPM) based motion estimation in the newest video coding standard known as HEVC is assessed. Truncated gray approach is based on the usage of the most significant bit-planes. Video coding performance between truncated gray approach and MAD measure is compared. As can be seen from the experimental results that low bit-depth representation based truncated gray approach shows a minor performance decrease about 0.2-0.25 dB (PSNR) at different bit-rates compared to MAD measure. It is possible to obtain a state of the art video coding module, which has low power consumption with truncated gray-based motion estimation if implemented in hardware.