S3TC Compression on Linux

Hello,

how widely supported is the GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc extension by Linux drivers?

Has anyone here had any experience using this extension on Linux?

Thanks

Looks like UT2k3/2k4 & Doom3 support(and require) this extention. OSG also work well with it.

This extension is supported quite well by Linux drivers,
as long as you install a “real” driver and don’t use the mesa software renderer which is installed by default. Mesa FAQ (look at last question 4.3)

Yeah works fine.

I think you can assume that the large majority of linux people have nvidia cards if they are intending to any 3D graphics. Ati is not that popular amongst linux folk, but that should be fine with it if they are not using mesa as previously mentioned. It’s not too big a deal to check for the extension and then change your internal format flags for glTexImage anyway even if it’s not supported…

The situation with ATI cards is getting better.
For cards up to the Radeon 9250 the free driver has been around for a long time, faster, more stable and with more extensions than the driver from ATI. Since some month there is a still experimental driver for all newer Radeon cards, that is the r300 and r400 series.

Since S3TC is patented you will have to install a separate library to get S3TC support with free drivers (which is legal here in europe, but not in some other parts of the world, as the USA). The drivers will support S3TC if they detect the presence of the external library.