RE: Texture compression patents

[Stefan D. <st...@co...>]

> So ALL Radeons can do decompression. Right now we have a system where
> we
> only upload S3TC textures if they were precompressed (NWN, UT2K4, etc.)
> and we have to force the extension on in order to do it.
This may be slightly off topic, but I am wondering if there's any way to
detect the ability to upload precompressed textures when
GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc is not available(aka the user hasn't forced
it). Wine and CrossOver users are regularly complaining that their games do
not work due to the lack of S3TC, but all Wine needs for D3D is the ability
to load precompressed textures(*). So I'd be perfectly happy with getting
just this feature, if the user just didn't have to do anything manually.

I think writing an extension spec is outside of the scope, but is there
something else, like setting an environment variable, or just trying to call
glCompressedTexImage even thought the extension isn't advertised?

Thanks,
Stefan

(*) D3D has a feature to compress textures, but it is independent of the
hardware's features.