S3TC => r600{c,g}

[Nille]

you are kidding on me? i SPEAK for germany!

No, you do not speak for germany

thats because software patents are valid in EU if the patent is bound to the hardware.
and the S3TC Patent ist bound to the HARDWARE->Graphic-card!
and the FAT Patent is bound to the HARDWARE (harddrive)

And if its bound to Hardware its no longer an SW Patent in EU.

[whizse]

I've only tried a few apps that use S3TC on r300... Neverwinter Nights, doom3, ut2004, and quake4 come to mind. Of those four, S3TC only works properly with NWN (last I tried).

Q4 won't even start without S3TC, and using the external lib on r300 with Q4 screws up the textures so bad the game is unplayable (as is the case with ut2004 and doom3). At least UT2004 and Doom3 will run without S3TC as it's not a hard requirement on those games.

So, here, s3tc works on r300g with one out of four apps. Not exactly impressive, and something that desperately needs to be addressed by someone.

Adam

Interesting, except for NWN I have played all those games with S3TC enabled on r300g, and I never noticed anything screwed up.

Is there a bug report open for this?

[adamk]

Honestly, I'm not aware of a bug report specific to s3tc on r300g. I mostly use FreeBSD, but next time I'm in Fedora, I'll give it a shot again and see if anything has improved.

[whizse]

Can it be the reason why it's not implemented?

I did notfind the DXT* register number in the AMD documentation. Or I may have searched wrong.

Maybe you can ping bridgman about this?

There was also some discussion and code written earlier this year, which sort of language lawyered around part of the problem, but I don't think it was ever merged? Not sure if more work was required or somebody silently vetoed the whole idea:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_name=e7bd23c31003292154v26272996nc0724f86e9635887%40mail.gmail.com

[netkas]

afaik, s3tc works in mesain two ways:

1)rgb/rgba texture compressed with help of libtxc_dxtn and sent to gpu

2) s3tc compressed texture sent to gpu

so, why not just skip compression in first case, and change texture type to GL_RGB/RGBA

in second case - decompress texture, chnage type and send to gpu

so bye bye s3tc then

[netkas]

by "bye bye" I mean - problem with s3tc supprot by specific card will be solved forever, not about patents

[whizse]

The bad news is that S3TC isn't the only patented stuff in GL3:
http://www.x.org/wiki/Events/XDC2009...OpenGL3andMesa

Oh, speak of the devil... Luca Barbieri have implemented floating point textures and render targets, will be interested to see how the patent side of things will be handled.

Of course also interesting since it's another large part of GL3 - and especially exciting for everyone who lusts after Unigine on free drivers

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2010-August/002562.html

[pingufunkybeat]

Go OpenGL3 in Mesa, go go go!

[adamk]

Interesting, except for NWN I have played all those games with S3TC enabled on r300g, and I never noticed anything screwed up.

Is there a bug report open for this?

I'm happy to say that I'm wrong. I don't know when this was resolved, but doom3 and ut2004 both ran just fine here with r300g + s3tc. Now I can only hope the same happens for r600 (classic or gallium) sometime soon.

Adam

[nanonyme]

I'm happy to say that I'm wrong. I don't know when this was resolved, but doom3 and ut2004 both ran just fine here with r300g + s3tc. Now I can only hope the same happens for r600 (classic or gallium) sometime soon.

Wonder if it requires RE work.