Intel Mesa To Force On S3TC, Floating-Point Textures

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Mesa To Force On S3TC, Floating-Point Textures

Two patches from Intel's Ian Romanick for their open-source Mesa DRI driver will now enable S3TC extensions always plus floating-point textures. These two features previously were not enabled by default out of patent fears...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTIwOTg

[przemoli]

Can Radeon and Nouveau follow the suite? Anyone from Intel to comment on that?

[89c51]

Can Radeon and Nouveau follow the suite? Anyone from Intel to comment on that?

This. Marek??? Or any of the other devs??

[curaga]

Enabling floats for only Intel does point to directions, wink wink, nudge nudge.

[remm]

Pretty impressive commitment from Intel to their open driver ! (I assume being able to make this commit was quite expensive)

[F i L]

This is awesome news, thanks a lot Intel, we appreciate it!

[phred14]

I wonder if the Intel legal department knows that they've done this. They've exposed the company here, as well as Mesa.

[agd5f]

That patch just removes the #ifdefs in the code. You still have to configure mesa with the appropriate configure option to actually enable the functionality.

[schmidtbag]

Shut up coward.

Normally I hate every other comment you make but I'd kinda have to agree with you on this one. While intel might be doing something really stupid getting themselves and Mesa in legal trouble, who the hell is going to stand up to intel at this point? Even if someone can win, the court costs would be enough to deter someone. For once linux has something it might not supposed to have with a gigantic wealthy company to back it up.

[DeepDayze]

Does this means that people can run games now without installing that S3TC library? What does it means exactly?

I don't think so as then the driver will most likely use some sort of fallback which will be slow. You should have the library available to make it work, actually. All these patches do is just advertise s3tc support whether or not the dxtn library is present