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R600 Gallium3D Driver Now Supports S3TC Library

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  • #31
    S3TC Patent Ownership

    So forgive me if this has been covered elsewhere, but I have never seen it discussed. Who owns the patent(s) for S3TC that prevent it from being used freely? Have the patent owners been asked for permission to freely use the patent in Mesa? If so, when were they last asked? If the answer was no, was a reason provided?

    I would like to know what party is causing all these problems for users of free software. It's such a shame that a patent is part of the OpenGL standard. It undermines the "open" part of OpenGL.

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    • #32
      Originally posted by AnonymousCoward View Post
      So forgive me if this has been covered elsewhere, but I have never seen it discussed. Who owns the patent(s) for S3TC that prevent it from being used freely? Have the patent owners been asked for permission to freely use the patent in Mesa? If so, when were they last asked? If the answer was no, was a reason provided?

      I would like to know what party is causing all these problems for users of free software. It's such a shame that a patent is part of the OpenGL standard. It undermines the "open" part of OpenGL.
      The name S3TC comes from a company that was named S3 who made graphics chips back in the 90s. I believe they were bought by Nvidia, so that's who would own the patent AFAIK.

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      • #33
        Originally posted by pvtcupcakes View Post
        The name S3TC comes from a company that was named S3 who made graphics chips back in the 90s. I believe they were bought by Nvidia, so that's who would own the patent AFAIK.
        Nevermind, they were bought by VIA not Nvidia.

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        • #34
          VIA opensource strategy ftw!

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          • #35
            Excellent news!

            Now we can finally use the S3TC library in games which need it, in order to process compressed textures properly... This might give a nice spped-up in some games that didn't play very well with R600+ cards...

            Now I'm just hoping for some proper video acceleration in the r600g driver in order to change from Catalyst to xf86-ati-r600g!

            Cheers and kudos for the FOSS ATI/AMD driver developers!

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            • #36
              Originally posted by pvtcupcakes View Post
              I'm curious as to what Dave meant when he was referring to the kernel? Is something related to s3tc being put into the kernel?
              No. He refers to the kernel because the CS checker is still rejecting compressed texture formats, and the CS checker is inside the DRM (kernel land). For the patches to have any effect the kernel code has to be adapted too.

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              • #37
                Originally posted by Nille View Post
                Why do you guess that? If i understand it he is working on optimize Gallium3D for the Video stuff.
                Because of his last e-mail. He is working on lunarglass, it seems.

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                • #38
                  Originally posted by Perry3D View Post
                  And if i understand right it is not enough to install the lib. You need to recompile mesa.
                  ..now. Expect this to land in Medibuntu or some such when it's ready. About time I'd say, Freetype has had patented code switched through build options for years. I'm interested in seeing what the performance is and if there's a performance hit compared to in-Mesa implementation.

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                  • #39
                    Originally posted by myxal View Post
                    ..now. Expect this to land in Medibuntu or some such when it's ready. About time I'd say, Freetype has had patented code switched through build options for years. I'm interested in seeing what the performance is and if there's a performance hit compared to in-Mesa implementation.
                    I don't think performance is that relevant for libtxc_dxn. If it becomes important libtxc_dxtn can always be replaced with libsquish, which provides SSE code on x86.

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                    • #40
                      Originally posted by HokTar View Post
                      Because of his last e-mail. He is working on lunarglass, it seems.
                      So where do you see a connection to LunarGLASS here??

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