ATI compressed texture formats & auto-compression

[Ian Romanick]

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Hamish wrote:

| OK. Thanks. I did see and understand about the software doing
compression.
| (Although IIUC it's perfectly legal here since you can't patent
software over
| here AFAIK). For some reason though, I was under the impression that
it was
| possible in HARDWARE.

I don't know of any hardware that natively compresses.  I think Nvidia
has a whitepaper on their site about accelerating the compression with
more recent GPUs, but you have to code it yourself.

| Which the user already owns a license to use, since if
| it's in the chip, we'd assume that the manufacturer has already paid the
| patent holder...

Which isn't even necessarily true.  Some hardware vendors got a
sublicense from Microsoft that allows them to expose the functionality
in D3D *only*.

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