If You Forgot, S3 Graphics Does Linux Drivers Too

[allquixotic]

You cannot do proper HDR, high-quality shadows or ambient occlusion without floating-point textures. Moreover, you cannot implement deferred rendering which is quite a big loss in terms of visual potential.

Ogg is technically superior to mp3. Unfortunately, there's no such alternative to floating-point textures. These patents confine Mesa to early R300/400 (~7 years old) graphical capabilities and guarantee that things like Unigine won't be able to run there at all.

Right, because Unigine (at least Heaven) uses all of the above, doesn't it?

And to think, I used to work literally nextdoor to the SGI headquarters. SGI used to be a huge booming business with offices all over the world and a growth curve comparable to Google; now they are more or less confined to one single-story edifice in Sunnyvale, CA. They had a nice cafeteria and our building didn't have a cafeteria at all, so sometimes my coworkers and I would go over there and buy lunch. Easier than hopping in the car to drive to a nearby food joint.

I'd wager that even most of SGI's old, loyal, professional 3d rendering customers have since moved on to NVIDIA, so what's keeping all those people employed? You guessed it. Patent royalties.

That's not to say I support what they're doing, of course; the greater good that could come about if their patents (let alone all software patents in general) were eliminated would far outweigh the good that is generated from keeping one or two-hundred upper-class citizens well-fed and taken care of.

I just wish I had taken the opportunity to sit down at the lunch table with one of their managers and listen to them try to justify their actions. But I was more naive about open source issues, and completely clueless about software patents, back in those days.

[Remco]

Awesome, an n-dimensional array of floating points is patented.

Here's your incredible invention: a 1024*1024*1024 floating point 3D texture! How the fuck did they invent this stuff?

double[][][] fuckPatents = new double[1024*4][1024*4][1024*4];

[Remco]

Bugs included, by the way. Stupid edit limit.

[BlackStar]

When even Microsoft are lobbying against software patents, you know something must be terribly wrong.

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,650,327.PN.&OS=PN/6,650,327&RS=PN/6,650,327

I wonder: this describes "a computer system, comprising: a processor for performing geometric calculations [...]" which seems to indicate hardware rendering. IANAL, but from my armchair this *might* serve as a loophole for software rendering, at least.

[crazycheese]

Im going to fill patent tomorrow guys, just that you know.
Its about "Abstract system having double floating point rasterization and double floating point framebuffering"

Someone please fill "tripple" please, just for the case.

And I would also like to register the upcoming patent number as a trademark. So, that each time anyone decides to mention it, will have to pay royalties just for that.

[marek]

SGI no longer own the patent. They sold their whole patent portfolio to Microsoft, who sold the floating-point patent to some patent holding company.

The core Mesa maintainers don't seem to be very active on this matter. There seems to be no one actively working on resolving this patent crysis, which is holding back GL3 support in OSS drivers.

[BlackStar]

SGI no longer own the patent. They sold their whole patent portfolio to Microsoft, who sold the floating-point patent to some patent holding company.

Oh, the OpenGL spec still lists SGI as the patent holder. I stand corrected.

[kazetsukai]

When even Microsoft are lobbying against software patents, you know something must be terribly wrong.

Really? Where'd you see that? If they're really lobbying /against/ patents, its incredibly comedic/hypocritical.