Super! Patented Mesa Floating-Point Is Merged!

[yesterday]

Apple has very few patents regarding h264. Nokia even has more patents against it as does educational institutions like Columbia. Sometimes I really think people point out apple because "all the other kool people do it".

Right.

And if you actually read what I wrote, I said their POSITION concerning h264. Namely, their position that h264 should be adopted as a web standard, which would basically kill any free-software browser aiming for HTML5 compatability.

Sometimes I think people don't read posts properly just so they can type in their ironic spellings of "cool".

[Prescience500]

As for SGI, I really doubt they would sue Red Hat, even if the latter start distributing Mesa with floating-point textures enabled. SGI's main products are high-performance servers running Red Hat and SUSE Linux, making things tricky.

Interesting, I wonder if Red Hat and SUSE could use their duopsonist power to to get them to give or buy mesa a patent exemption for a relatively low price.

[Mo6eB]

For anybody still looking, I'm pretty sure that this is the patent in question.

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=mIIOAAAAEBAJ&output=text

As for SGI, I really doubt they would sue Red Hat, even if the latter start distributing Mesa with floating-point textures enabled. SGI's main products are high-performance servers running Red Hat and SUSE Linux, making things tricky.

[Prescience500]

Float textures may increase visual quality in exchange for performance, but only in apps that can use it!

S3TC increases performance by reducing bandwidth load.

Ohhh, ok. Thanks for the clarification.

[V!NCENT]

Large companies that ship Linux with a computer or ship commercial Linux should get a license that will cost the consumer twice of the added license price and with that particular profit buy the patent from SGI or SGI itself.

Companies like that should simply be eliminated. The acquired patents should be used to bankrupt/troll other troll companies.

[liam]

I haven't read the linked to document yet but it SOUNDS obvious...but that would hardly be the first time an obvious thing has been patented

Thanks for the explanation!

[marek]

Float textures may increase visual quality in exchange for performance, but only in apps that can use it!

S3TC increases performance by reducing bandwidth load.

[Prescience500]

I wonder if you need to have the patent to be able to legally use the extension for testing purposes. I'm curious about how much of a performance bump it brings.

[smitty3268]

I did a quick search on floating point textures but couldnt find a succinct (or even a lengthy stand-alone) definition. Could someone either explain it or point to a good source?
***hides head in shame***

This is the GL extension added: http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs...ture_float.txt

Essentially a texture is just a big map of pixel locations and the associated color value at each one. Pixel[0,0] = 256, Pixel[0,1] = 189, etc. Floating point textures merely allow the values stored inside the texture to be floating point numbers instead of restricting them to whole numbers only.

If this concept seems obvious and you're wondering how anyone could get a patent on this idea, you aren't alone. Doing FP calculations in hardware is much more complex than whole numbers, but there's really no difference at all on the software side.

[Drago]

I did a quick search on floating point textures but couldnt find a succinct (or even a lengthy stand-alone) definition. Could someone either explain it or point to a good source?
***hides head in shame***

second that