S3TC Is Still Problematic For Mesa Developers, Users

[TheLexMachine]

That may be true but if a participant in the OIN was withholding patents then wouldn't the patents being withheld be referenced on the OIN web site?

The thing of it is that the S3TC patents are big money due to licensing and royalties from hardware that uses it and we don't know what the status of S3TC tech is after HTC bought S3 Graphics, which was already owned by HTC's parent company, The VIA Group. It may be that the S3TC patents were purchased by HTC and then transferred to VIA Technologies or some other company in The VIA Group, which means that OIN has absolutely no reach in such an instance as only HTC is a member of OIN. Until someone probes HTC for information about the current state of things - which I don't think anyone has bothered to do - there can be no S3TC implemented in Mesa.

[jonwil]

People, OIN does not require members to donate all patents. The members can decide to withhold some.

http://www.infoworld.com/t/linux/lin...attacks-188156

That may be true but if a participant in the OIN was withholding patents then wouldn't the patents being withheld be referenced on the OIN web site?

[curaga]

People, OIN does not require members to donate all patents. The members can decide to withhold some.

http://www.infoworld.com/t/linux/linux-gets-bigger-shield-against-patent-attacks-188156

[jonwil]

Ok, so maybe the answer is for someone to contact the right people at HTC and find out for sure if they do in fact own the patent in question. If we find out that they are the legal owners of the patent, then due to HTC and Mesa both being part of the OIN, Mesa can freely use the S3TC patent.

[Kivada]

Well, VIA may have a 1W TDP CPU, but it is extremely slow (C7 @ 500 MHz), and still requires a two-die chipset to function. On the other hand, both Intel and AMD have SoCs (chipset fully integrated) with an overall TDP of < 5 W. Intel even has < 3 W TDP parts. I don't see an edge for VIA here at all. VIA-based designs are more complex (three dice on the PCB instead of one), will chug more power and perform worse.

Yep, the 4.5w AMD G-T16R is one of the most current for low draw x86.

[GreatEmerald]

ASTC was announced with iirc OpenGL 4.3, but didn't became part of the profile nor did it in 4.4. It still is an extension, neither is it implemented in any desktop driver. So atm there is no ASTC. It's just available on a paper. And cause of its complexity I assume it will stay like that for a while.
Never the less, as long as all drivers implement a texture compression in software, it is worthless (like ETC). And software implementations can't be accelerated, cause they send the decompressed bitmap to the GPU increasing bandwidth a lot when accessing the texture (the whole point of texture compression (on PCs) is to reduce gpu<->vram bandwidth, reducing memory requirements doesn't matter with >512MB vram). So the only thing that can be accelerated is the decompressing before sending it to the GPU, but that's worthless and has no impact on the _final_ performance (it just reduces a lag when sending the texture).

It's not yet part of it? Hmm, well, that can be a problem indeed, then.
As for the acceleration part, I meant "if the hardware has no such capability, do it in software; else do it completely in hardware; since it's much faster in hardware and we have a software implementation for it written already, let's add hardware support for it in our new graphics cards".

[-jK-]

Eh? So you're saying that you think it'll fail due to it being too new?.. IIRC ASTC is part of the OpenGL spec, so drivers will have to support it if they want to claim OpenGL compliance. Not necessarily in hardware, but if you're supporting it in software, might as well also have it accelerated. So yes, it's still not the fault of the developers that S3TC is preferred, but it will be in a few years. Or, you know, they will stop preferring it.

ASTC was announced with iirc OpenGL 4.3, but didn't became part of the profile nor did it in 4.4. It still is an extension, neither is it implemented in any desktop driver. So atm there is no ASTC. It's just available on a paper. And cause of its complexity I assume it will stay like that for a while.
Never the less, as long as all drivers implement a texture compression in software, it is worthless (like ETC). And software implementations can't be accelerated, cause they send the decompressed bitmap to the GPU increasing bandwidth a lot when accessing the texture (the whole point of texture compression (on PCs) is to reduce gpu<->vram bandwidth, reducing memory requirements doesn't matter with >512MB vram). So the only thing that can be accelerated is the decompressing before sending it to the GPU, but that's worthless and has no impact on the _final_ performance (it just reduces a lag when sending the texture).

[brent]

Yes, inertia is a big reason for any entrenched industry.

However they do still have some edge - as far as I know, no Atom is capable of 1W max / 0.1W idle. The lowest-powered Atom is around 3W IIRC. Their CPUs aren't really buggy; but the same can't be said for their graphics and to some extent chipsets.

Well, VIA may have a 1W TDP CPU, but it is extremely slow (C7 @ 500 MHz), and still requires a two-die chipset to function. On the other hand, both Intel and AMD have SoCs (chipset fully integrated) with an overall TDP of < 5 W. Intel even has < 3 W TDP parts. I don't see an edge for VIA here at all. VIA-based designs are more complex (three dice on the PCB instead of one), will chug more power and perform worse.

[curaga]

Maybe, but I really wonder why. VIAs products simply cannot compete in terms of power consumption, features or performance. I remember the last time I heard about VIA they tried to peddle a 25W CPU as a "market-leading energy efficient" solution, which was quite ridiculous. On top of that, VIAs hardware tends to be quite buggy and software/driver support is pretty bad, even on Windows.

I guess most embedded hardware that still uses VIA solutions only does so because it was designed ages ago when VIA still had a small edge. I can't imagine anyone using VIA-based hardware for new developments.

Yes, inertia is a big reason for any entrenched industry.

However they do still have some edge - as far as I know, no Atom is capable of 1W max / 0.1W idle. The lowest-powered Atom is around 3W IIRC. Their CPUs aren't really buggy; but the same can't be said for their graphics and to some extent chipsets.

[brent]

Yes, Via is still fairly strong in the embedded sector (gambling machines, digital signage).

Maybe, but I really wonder why. VIAs products simply cannot compete in terms of power consumption, features or performance. I remember the last time I heard about VIA they tried to peddle a 25W CPU as a "market-leading energy efficient" solution, which was quite ridiculous. On top of that, VIAs hardware tends to be quite buggy and software/driver support is pretty bad, even on Windows.

I guess most embedded hardware that still uses VIA solutions only does so because it was designed ages ago when VIA still had a small edge. I can't imagine anyone using VIA-based hardware for new developments.