Ayahuasca wrote:
> Hi all.
> 
> I'm a proud Radeon owner with an Gentoo-1.4 / Unreal Tournament 2003 
> Demo CD.
> I also have a Geforce 2 MX 400 (my brother's but he gave it to me when 
> he sold the rest of his computer) and I've confirmed that UT runs GREAT 
> on it.
> Anyway, I understand that S3 have been approached a few times regarding 
> their patented S3 Texture Compression.
> I expect there's about 1% chance they will give the DRI team the OK to 
> go ahead with implementing their Texture Compression (their patents are 
> all they have). Now unfortunately I have a 'classic' radeon (64MB DDR 
> VIVO) which (I assume) is unsupported by ATI's closed-source binaries, 
> so their drivers aren't an option.

Hopefully, S3 is more concerned about licensing to the hardware manufacturers
than driver vendors.

In the DRI drivers, using a compressed textures will be little more than
specifying a new register value to indicate the compressed format.  In software,
it's just an implementation of the algorithm spelt out in the OpenGL extension
specification.  It's hardly a secret technique.


 > So instead I would hope that ATI (or
 > possibly S3) would provide a closed-source binary module to add S3
 > Texture Compression to the Radeon / all DRI drivers.
> Is this possible? (ie the DRI Radeon module with a supporting S3 Texture 
> Compression module)?

A binary module could be done in principle, but supporting binary modules
is a real chore.  And since the algorithms are public, anyone could go and
re-implement the binary module.  So, it would be kind of pointless.

-Brian



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