S3TC Now Golden For Linux & Open-Source?

[RealNC]

Sounds like S4TC is about to be released, making S3TC irrelevant. I've been around the block a few times. Every time we attain a victory, it turns out to be irrelevant to the present day.

How are thousands of programs currently using S3TC irrelevant?

[AnonymousCoward]

I see...so S3TC is just a highly recommended piece for OGL and *hopefully* the floating point texture patents can also be dealt with then we can have GL3 level support which surely is needed for any decent titles to run on Linux

What decent titles are there for Linux anyway?

The way I see it the only way to run decent titles on Linux is by using Wine. Mesa is already quite capable of running games under Wine, it's just that the fps is nothing to write home about. Personally, I'd rather see that the developers prioritized performance optimizations over new GL 3 features.

[curaga]

What decent titles are there for Linux anyway?

The way I see it the only way to run decent titles on Linux is by using Wine. Mesa is already quite capable of running games under Wine, it's just that the fps is nothing to write home about. Personally, I'd rather see that the developers prioritized performance optimizations over new GL 3 features.

You will have black textures under Wine too without S3TC on those titles.

[oibaf]

S3TC is not required for any OpenGL, although lots of games don't run without it.

The real blocker for implementing OpenGL (the version 3.0 in particular) is floating-point renderbuffers:

http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs...ture_float.txt

At least debian (and probably Ubuntu also when it will sync current debian package in 12.04) is officially enabling it:
http://packages.debian.org/changelog...11-6/changelog
http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=...663f486fdf03e0

[jonwil]

Anyone know who actually owns the floating point patent? It says it was originally assigned to SGI but SGI dont exist anymore.

[elanthis]

Interested about the floating point textures being enabled in Debian. I hadn't seen any discussion of it on the relevant graphics lists, but maybe I missed it. Is the reasoning here that the patent only covers the implementation of the rendering pipeline using FP textures and so hardware-backed drivers can freely use them since the patented algorithms are all in the hardware? Or are the patents just being ignored by the Debian folks? I hope people aren't just ignoring it in any way, because the FP patent is being actively used to harass and shakedown organizations: http://www.patentlyapple.com/patentl...nst-apple.html

[whizse]

A lot of other stuff that was disabled due to patents has recently been enabled again, H264 encoding, MP3 encoding etc.

I wouldn't be surprised if libtxc-dxtn would be accepted too, if somebody goes to the trouble of uploading it.

Not sure what the reasoning behind this move is though.

[marek]

Dunno, maybe OIN is somehow involved with this?

[bug!]

Disappointing.
The title made me believe that it's relevant to BSDs too.

[Drago]

Disappointing.
The title made me believe that it's relevant to BSDs too.

Just out of curiosity. What bsds have that Linux hasn't?