Mesa Enables S3TC Support For 3D Textures

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa Enables S3TC Support For 3D Textures

The feature work continues pouring in for Mesa 24.0 with new OpenGL and Vulkan driver features continuing to be enabled...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-S3TC-For-3D-Textures

[ssokolow]

Nice. I won't lose support for the S3TC textures on the second disc of my Unreal Tournament '99 GOTY if I switch away from nVidia now.

I thought the patent on those things ran out and they got enabled years ago. Didn't Phoronix have a post about that?

[Dukenukemx]

What year is this? I thought S3TC was already integrated?

[bridgman]

AFAIK 2D textures were enabled a while ago; this is for 3D textures.

[Quackdoc]

this might help bliss and waydroid, there were some games that exhibited some odd issues I've been meaning to look into, I think one of them was some card game? unless the 3d part is fairly new, I know the 2d stuff helped a game or two

[smitty3268]

so for now at least this support is just enables for GLES3 contexts

That's incorrect, Michael. The patch also enables it for any drivers exposing ARB_ES3_compatibility, which is most of them in Mesa.

[jokeyrhyme]

What year is this? I thought S3TC was already integrated?

I remember something about it being patent-encumbered

[Adarion]

I also think it is about these _3D_ textures (seems to be like a layered bitmap graphcis, a bitmap with a z axis information added, unlike the classic textures). S3TC was an old thing and yes, there were "intellectual achievement" problems (I avoid the term property a little), so first there was an external lib (libtxc_dxtn) and you had to set an environment variable to enable S3TC, but when the patent was running out it was quickly integrated in official mesa, enabled by default and (commercial*) distributors shipped it, too.
But that seems only to have been done for 2d textures, which - to my knowledge - were the default for quite a bunch of games and maybe other software.

* the ones that are enterprise based and could easily be sued, same with (not) enabling mp3 playback for years, dvd-css and so on