The S3TC Patent Might Be Invalid

[Nobu]

Would having a separate lifetime for development and marketing of a patented item make it more reasonable?

For instance, 10 years time during development, but once development is complete you only have 2 years time to market (or the remainder of the 10 year development period, whichever is shorter). The given time periods are only for example--I don't know what would be reasonable, as far as that is concerned.

[Hephasteus]

You're wrong here. HDR is the natural way your eyes work. I think you're confusing HDR rendering with shaders that try to fake the "HDR-look" and are based on "bloom".

You read more about true HDR rendering on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDR_rendering)

Explaining it doesn't make me hate it any less. Just because it can produce nice screen shots on 1 frame out a milion rendered doesn't mean it's not obnoxious.

[RealNC]

Explaining it doesn't make me hate it any less. Just because it can produce nice screen shots on 1 frame out a milion rendered doesn't mean it's not obnoxious.

To each his own. In my (and the majority's) opinion, games without HDR look more artificial. With HDR, they look like they actually resemble reality more closely.

So no, it's not obnoxious. It's just you.

[curaga]

YMMV. Most HDR-rendered pics look worse to my eyes too (and this is on a IPS screen).

[Azpegath]

YMMV. Most HDR-rendered pics look worse to my eyes too (and this is on a IPS screen).

We simply need displays and color depths that can show at least 32 bits and a dynamic range of infinity:1

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tut...amic-range.htm
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tut...perception.htm

[plonoma]

In the 18th Century, when the Founding Fathers established the United States, communications and distribution of a good were slow. The Founding Fathers felt 7 years was an adequate amount of time for an inventor/investor to recover their development costs and possibly ("POSSIBLY", mind you, not guarantee) make some profit. Fast forward to the 21st Century: communications are near instant, the time to distribute a good has decreased significantly, and patent terms have been extended. Extended. In a world where recovery of the development costs is also significantly reduced and a company CAN make a profit. Excessive profits even. Extending patent protection was not the answer, since now, instead of promoting the arts and sciences, patents now hinder said progress.

The correct solution should have been to decrease patent terms to 3 to 3.5 years: a suitable amount of time to recover costs and make a profit. Patents in the 21st Century are used as a means to lock others out of a market and stifle competitors(or at least make attempts to: see the recent Apple suits against everyone in the mobile computing device space). As it stands, when most patents expire nowadays, the technology/concept it covered has long since been abandoned by consumers, making the technology/concept worthless, except for any historical value it may hold. Think about it: what company in their right mind would now build a cellphone crammed full of tech from 1994? Consumers will say "Oh! How quaint! an antique cellphone!" and pass it on by.....

I don't feel abolishing patents completely is the answer(except software patents: software evolves too fast to be hindered by patents). Again, as I stated before: patent terms need to be reduced, not extended.

Many things now ask for a lot of time to develop the product from the idea/prototype that works.
But maybe different terms for different kinds of patents would be appropriate.

[BlackStar]

Lol at people confusing high-dynamic range with bloom.

Things are simple: 8bpp do not offer enough range to represent the contrast between sunlit and shadowed geometry. HDR involve using more bpp (usually 16 or 32) to improve the dynamic range and a tonemapping step to reduce the extra bits to the 8bpp that monitors can display.

Of course, many games add fluff such as bloom effects that have little to do with HDR itself, which is what people seem to dislike. HDR by itself is 100% necessary for any modern-looking 3d game.

[NomadDemon]

how about 24 bits?

[Drago]

how about 24 bits?

He meant 8bit per color component.

[V!NCENT]

More colors are useless because not a single consimer panel supports correct colors (like the Adobe standard). The cheapest true color panel is sold by Dell for 800 euro's and is LCD...

Now software patents; they are not useless because hardware must be involved. We live in an age where embedded systems are everywhere and large part of the magic happens in software. However being able to patent obvious shit like floating point on a piece of PC hardware is far from an invention that gets us anywhere near a better product offering that we wouldn't have got without the patent, anyway...