S3TC Now Golden For Linux & Open-Source?

[V!NCENT]

I'm sure that the BSD's can join the network and negotiate a deal. It would be a little wierd if it couldn't...

Besides, KMS work is being in progress on at least FreeBSD.

[archibald]

KMS et. al. are being worked on in OpenBSD as well.

[droidhacker]

I'm sure that the BSD's can join the network and negotiate a deal. It would be a little wierd if it couldn't...

Besides, KMS work is being in progress on at least FreeBSD.

No, I don't believe that you're right. I do not believe that BSD could enter into this agreement unless they adopted the GPL -- otherwise everyone else in the system gets screwed over because their patents could be implemented in a proprietary and secret manner within non open source software. Further, Apple has a relationship with BSD, and you know full well that although apple would be welcomed into OIN with open arms, they would NEVER go for it (since it would prevent them from trolling, and trolling is what Apple does...) -- it would be a messy situation, to say the least.

[mdias]

BSD using Mesa is irrelevant. The code can be #ifdef'ed to compile only on linux.

[DeepDayze]

Sounds like great news and is a big step towards getting S3TC support enabled by default within Mesa. Once everything's clarified WRT to the HTC patents, then surely this is a big win for OSS and Linux. What other obstacles remain in getting Mesa on par with the latest OpenGL specs?

[mattst88]

For the Mesa devs the Linux kernel is by far the most important one, if not the only one, since, as you might recall, they even got rid of DRI1 stuff that creates problems for non-Linux OSes like BSD & Solaris.

Actually, not exactly. While lots of people work on Mesa at Red Hat, Intel, AMD, and Google for Linux, the VMware guys apparently maintain a number of Gallium3D drivers for Windows.

[marek]

Sounds like great news and is a big step towards getting S3TC support enabled by default within Mesa. Once everything's clarified WRT to the HTC patents, then surely this is a big win for OSS and Linux. What other obstacles remain in getting Mesa on par with the latest OpenGL specs?

S3TC is not required for any OpenGL, although lots of games don't run without it.

The real blocker for implementing OpenGL (the version 3.0 in particular) is floating-point renderbuffers:

http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/ARB/texture_float.txt

[DeepDayze]

S3TC is not required for any OpenGL, although lots of games don't run without it.

The real blocker for implementing OpenGL (the version 3.0 in particular) is floating-point renderbuffers:

http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs...ture_float.txt

I see...so S3TC is just a highly recommended piece for OGL and *hopefully* the floating point texture patents can also be dealt with then we can have GL3 level support which surely is needed for any decent titles to run on Linux

[RealNC]

Sounds like S4TC is about to be released, making S3TC irrelevant. I've been around the block a few times. Every time we attain a victory, it turns out to be irrelevant to the present day.

How are thousands of programs currently using S3TC irrelevant?

[AnonymousCoward]

I see...so S3TC is just a highly recommended piece for OGL and *hopefully* the floating point texture patents can also be dealt with then we can have GL3 level support which surely is needed for any decent titles to run on Linux

What decent titles are there for Linux anyway?

The way I see it the only way to run decent titles on Linux is by using Wine. Mesa is already quite capable of running games under Wine, it's just that the fps is nothing to write home about. Personally, I'd rather see that the developers prioritized performance optimizations over new GL 3 features.