http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14939
--- Comment #5 from Ben Klein shacklein@gmail.com 2008-09-07 22:16:03 --- After some research, I now understand more about the problem here. Wine can't implement a DXTC/S3TC encoder without violating the S3TC patent, and probably the same goes for a decoder.
A while ago in #winehackers someone suggested that this particular decoding function could be offloaded to the GPU (when the appropriate functionality is available). The process would be essentially: 1. Load S3TC texture into a PBO 2. GPU converts to ARGB 3. Wine reads back the converted texture from PBO
Of course, this won't work when the GPU doesn't support S3TC/DXTC textures. I've been meaning to write a PoC for this, but haven't had the time. Comments?