Interestingly, the post-trial judge opinion at http://wi.findacase.com/research/wfrmDocViewer.aspx/xq/fac.%5CFDCT%5CWWI%5C2008%5C20080801_0000734.WWI.htm/qx contains the following text:
<< Plaintiff’s expert, Dr. Stevenson, testified that the ‘327 patent is directed to “a special purpose hardware component designed and optimized specifically for high speed graphics processing. " The specification makes it plain that the invention does not relate to software for graphics. As the inventors noted, such programs “are well known in the art." [...] Claim 17 does not say in so many words that the method it discloses is a rasterization circuit operating on a floating point format, but that is what it describes. Reading the disputed claims as disclosing hardware is not reading a preferred embodiment in the claims; it is simply reading the claims as the person of ordinary skill would read a patent directed to special purpose hardware. >> This seems to indicate that it would be safe to implement floating point textures/framebuffers in Mesa, as both SGI and ATI and the court seemed to agree that the patent applies specifically to hardware. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Mesa3d-dev mailing list Mesa3d-dev@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mesa3d-dev
