S3TC Support Will Land In Mesa Now That The Patent Has Expired

As mentioned last week, the S3TC patent has now expired. With the S3 Texture Compression no longer encumbered by a patent, support for it is being added to mainline Mesa.

Matt Turner of Intel has sent out a patch this morning, on the S3TC patent expiry date, to add support to mainline Mesa. The code used is what previously lived in its own standalone libtxc_dxtn library.

With the patches, EXT_texture_compress_s3tc and ANGLE_texture_compression_dxt are enabled by default in all supported configurations.

The patches for now can be found on Mesa-dev and will hopefully be merged to mainline in the days ahead for Mesa 17.3.