SAN JOSE, Calif. — SGI, better known as Silicon Graphics Inc., has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against ATI Technologies Inc.

The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in the Western District of Wisconsin, asserts that products in ATI's line of Radeon graphics processors infringe U.S. Patent No. 6,650,327. The complaint seeks unspecified damages and a court ordered injunction against future infringement by ATI.

"The Company's technology covered by the '327 patent is an important resource in achieving enhanced graphics processing demanded by today's computer systems," said Dennis McKenna, CEO of graphics workstation maker SGI, in a statement. "SGI has licensed this technology to ATI's major competitors and, as I have previously been stating publicly, SGI intends to aggressively protect and enforce its IP. This is the first visible step in that process."

United States Patent 6,650,327 Airey , et al. November 18, 2003

A floating point rasterization and frame buffer in a computer system graphics program. The rasterization, fog, lighting, texturing, blending, and antialiasing processes operate on floating point values. In one embodiment, a 16-bit floating point format consisting of one sign bit, ten mantissa bits, and five exponent bits (s10e5), is used to optimize the range and precision afforded by the 16 available bits of information. In other embodiments, the floating point format can be defined in the manner preferred in order to achieve a desired range and precision of the data stored in the frame buffer. The final floating point values corresponding to pixel attributes are stored in a frame buffer and eventually read and drawn for display. The graphics program can operate directly on the data in the frame buffer without losing any of the desired range and precision of the data.

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