Apparently, Creative has a patent on Carmack's Reverse, and they successfully forced Id to modify their techniques for the source drop, as well as to include EAX in Doom 3.

But Carmack's Reverse is discussed quite often and apparently it's a good choice for deferred shading, so it's presumably used in a lot of other high-budget productions too.

Even though it's unlikely that Creative would go after smaller companies, I'm wondering how the bigger studios get around this problem. Do they just cross their fingers and hope Creative doesn't troll them, or do they just not use Carmack's Reverse at all?