DaveBaumann said:All it'd take would be for Texas Instruments to enforce some of their old graphics patents and all the graphics vendors would be in deep doo-doos.
Humus said:If you never sued anyone before, then suddenly start doing it, you'll have a hard time to present your case in court. Not protecting your patent in the past counts against you.
Dio said:Well, the example I was closest to was the S3-Intel storm in a teacup.
Intel sues S3
S3 countersues Intel,
big gap
patent cross-licencing agreement signed
Only the lawyers made any money out of it AFAIK.
You do NOT need to protect your patent. You can start suing anyone you wish at any time - in fact, that's exactly what is happening today, patent something more or less obvious, then wait until everyone is using it, start suing. That's exactly what happened with the so-called "GIF patent". GIF would never have become a standard image format if the patent would have been enforced from the beginning - simply because there are/were a lot of quite similar compression algorithms around which do not violate this patent and are just as good.Humus said:If you never sued anyone before, then suddenly start doing it, you'll have a hard time to present your case in court. Not protecting your patent in the past counts against you.
DaveBaumann said:Wasn't there talk a little while back about USB key drives? They all have an FAT file system on them and MS recently decided that they owe them for it?
ATI actually had multitexturing on the market before 3dfx. The Rage Pro could do some limited combination of 2 textures in one pass, although it was initially available only through CIF, since multitexturing only appeared in DX6, and as far as OpenGL was concerned, ATI initially had no drivers for it, then had really crappy drivers for it, and basically only got multitexturing in when DX6 was already available. Still, that's not half as bad as VQ texture compression, which never appeared outside CIF. So basically ATI was first with both texture compression and multitexturing, but managed to botch them big time.ChrisRay said:This brings up an interesting questions. How similar is ATIS early adoption of Multexturing? I know ATI has done some wierd things in the past, (3 texture Units per pipe)