AFR Patented

[Geo]

Back when NV reintroduced SLI with AFR, I went back to the old ATI MAXX pages and noticed they claimed a patent pending on AFR. "Hmm, wonder what happened to that?" Just looking at some of the ATI CrossFire slides I noticed that now they are claiming "ATI's patented technology" with regards to AFR.

So what's up with that? Do any of our patent-office gurus know what patent# it is? Was it trivial or non-trivial for NV to get around it, or is ATI keeping their powder dry for a lawsuit later?

 

[no-X]

Yes. Here are some old Rage Fury MAXX slides (patent pending AFR):

(Single-pass?) multitexturing and some mipmapping techniques were also patented by 3Dfx and nVidia used them without permission. Nothing new

 

[Geo]

The fact that ATI is talking about their patent on their slides is at least an indicator that they are reserving their rights as they see them.

From what I can see, SLI would be screwed without AFR. But then this whole area is so incestuous; only NV's patent lawyers know how many areas they think they have ATI dead to rights on infringing NV/3dfx patents, should the pissing match commence.

 

[Dave Baumann]

I don't think you'll ever see people contest over infringment unless they they are being sued over something (i.e. a counter suit). Like many thing, Graphics technology from one manufacturer to another is so intertwined they are probably patenting more for protection sake rather than enforcement.

 

[AlNom]

somehow, I like that underlying purpose for patenting ideas than what we normally see.

 

[Geo]

I don't think you'll ever see people contest over infringment unless they they are being sued over something (i.e. a counter suit). Like many thing, Graphics technology from one manufacturer to another is so intertwined they are probably patenting more for protection sake rather than enforcement.

And maybe for licensing. Might have been more of a comfort to SiS. . .who doesn't have as much counter ammunition nor resources to contest with in the uglier scenarios.

 

[Ostsol]

Getting a patent on something is also a safe way to prevent competitors (who might actually sue for patent infringement) from patenting it.

 

[wireframe]

I find it strange that AFR would be patented. Surely there may be some specific underlying tricks to assist that could be patented, but Alternate Frame Rendering? That's like putting two sheets of paper together and patenting the idea of a book, is it not? SLI/Crossfire split-screen algorithms may have some rationale and super-tiling for sure, but AFR? C'mon.

 

[Dave Baumann]

Well, you've got deferring of a frame between the CPU and graphics and alternatly flippng the data being sent from one device to the next - not necessarily immediately obvious, or at least no less obvious than splitting the screen into chunks and having different chips render different bits.

 

[nutball]

I'm suprised that SGI didn't do something like AFR back in their glory days.

 

[MfA]

If you have control of the entire rendering pipeline AFR is only a decent idea when working on clusters, which wasnt really relevant to SGI.

There are probably a lot of old offline raytracers which used it long before ATI though.

 

[ondaedg]

Yes. Here are some old Rage Fury MAXX slides (patent pending AFR):


(Single-pass?) multitexturing and some mipmapping techniques were also patented by 3Dfx and nVidia used them without permission. Nothing new

It wasn't as simple as Nvidia was using 3dfx's patent just because 3dfx filed patent infringement. I would suggest reading the claim (although it is a long read if you can find it).

The same principle applies to AFR rendering. In order for ATI to claim a patent for this, they would have to have a specific methodology to do this. If Nvidia is using a different methodology, then there is no patent infringement. The idea of patenting the theory "idea" of alternate frame rendering is a whole different can of worms.

(edited to remove images)

 

[db]

I'm suprised that SGI didn't do something like AFR back in their glory days.

the high-end SGI machines supported AFR in multipipe (multi-adapter) configurations as far back as 1991 (VGXT/skywriter). The individual adapters were exposed through low-level APIs (IRISGL/OpenGL) and then aggregated into a single abstraction in middleware (Performer).

 

[DemoCoder]

Both SFR and AFR are completely obvious. If you put any group of engineers into a locked room for a few hours, and asked them to come up with a way to combine and scale two GPUs, these would be some of the first solutions to fly out of their mouths.

In fact, such techniques have already been used in the offline rendering community way before the MAXX.

The patent system sucks.

 

[trinibwoy]

The patent system sucks.

But how else would you protect truly novel ideas. I know some people think these don't exist and are all derivative of something else but not everything is as plainly obvious as SFR and AFR.

 

[Jawed]

Why do new ideas need protecting?...

Jawed

 

[BRiT]

Why do new ideas need protecting?...

Jawed

Because other evil people will claim you stole their ideas.