[joshuak]

This is great! I don't truly believe that no software patent should ever be granted, but we should definitely weed out the bullshit ones.

I would think mipmapping would be the core prior art, and that's from 1983. But I suppose anything over a year older then the application is good enough.

Also note there is another technique for patent manipulation which is to provide a provisional patent application (to start the clock) which can't be granted, then continually refine and the application as time goes by. In a worse case scenario you could taller a general patent into a specific patent based on someone else work, and have a patent already in place that will predate the new invention.