PowerVR SDK 2.9 launches

// October 20th, 2011 // No Comments » // Tools and SDK

We are very excited to announce the latest revision of our PowerVR Insider SDK, one of the world’s leading and most comprehensive Graphics SDKs. Revision 2.9 is available now to download for free here: http://www.imgtec.com/powervr/insider/powervr-sdk.asp

Within the SDK we include a set of utilities to help with development, and demos and training courses that help lead the developer in understanding key parts of the tool chain. We have now expanded the SDK with the following content:

Platform Support

• LG Optimus 3D

• Android using Native Activity – Our Android SDK now uses the Android NDK, making it even easier to develop Android applications and create apks. Our SDK now targets Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) as a minimum.

Training Courses

• OpenGL ES 2.0 User Interface demo: Having a fast and responsive user interface is the key to a fluid experience. This demo demonstrates the best means of accelerating a UI within OpenGL ES on a mobile device, as well as thoroughly discussing possible optimizations of the effect for PowerVR hardware.

• OpenGL ES 2.0 Parallax Bump Mapping demo. The parallax bump mapping effect is one of the most advanced, and one of the most widely used bumpmap effects in desktop computing, this training course shows how to implement this effect in OpenGL ES 2.0 and how to optimize the effect for PowerVR hardware.

Demos

• OpenGL ES 1.1 Navigation3D demo. This is an OpenGL ES 1.1 port of our OpenGL ES 2.0 Navigation3D demo, which demonstrates how to optimally load and render real-world 3D navigation data using the SDK’s 3D navigation tools

Utilities

• PVRTrace: TraceGUI has been updated with an improved UI, giving more information per frame and features much improved loading times. Render state tracking has been improved significantly, and the recording libraries and GUI now record extensions. In addition to support for recording graphics API calls on Linux and Windows, the 2.9 SDK introduces Android recording libraries.

• PVRTune: PVRTune has improved support for the latest range of PowerVR GPUs, visualization of multiple render targets in the timing data, process IDs in the timing data, as well as new counters, and the ability for PVRScope enabled applications to send custom marks to PVRTune in real-time.

• PVRShaman: PVRShaman now includes a texture viewer window that allows you to see render targets updating in real time, graphical updates in the form of a view window grid and axis, as well as a considerable improvement in debug output due to improved PVRUniSCoEditor integration. On top of all of this we have a slew of bug fixes, and support for 3D Studio Max and Autodesk Maya user data.

• PVRTexTool: PVRTexTool now has a much higher quality PVRTC compressor, and supports dithering. Max and Maya plug-ins now support the latest versions (2012) on Windows.

• PVRTexLib: The library has been updated with the new PVRTC compressor and dithering as well, and a much anticipated feature – the library is now fully thread safe!

• PVRGeoPOD/Collada2POD: The POD exporter pair have a slightly improved UI, support for the exporting of 3D Studio Max and Autodesk Maya user data. In addition, the PVRGeoPOD plugins have been updated for the latest versions of Max and Maya.

On top of all of this we’ve improved 64bit support throughout, and completely rewritten the user manuals for PVRTrace, PVRShaman, PVRTexTool, PVRGeoPOD, Collada2POD, PVRUniSCoEditor, Filewrap, and PVRVFrame based on your feedback. New manuals for PVRTune, PVRVecEx, PVRTexLib and PVRScope are on their way. Full release notes are available here: http://www.imgtec.com/powervr/insider/sdkdownloads/whats_new.asp

Get the latest utilities and SDK at www.powervrinsider.com.

Regards, Bryce

SGX/SGX-XT Architecture Guide is now online!

// June 22nd, 2011 // No Comments » // Developers, News

The SGX Architecture Guide for Developers document is now publicly available on the SDK Documentation webpage.

It provides an overview, from a graphics developers perspective, of how the POWERVR architecture compares to other solutions, what the benefits of the architecture are and how an application can benefit from its unique approach to 3D graphics acceleration.

PVRTune has been updated!

// June 7th, 2011 // No Comments » // Developers, News, Tools and SDK

PVRTune – the POWERVR GPU performance analysis tool – has been updated.

In additional to a number of performance improvements and bug fixes, support for SGXPerfServer has now been added for Android on ARM platforms.

The updated utility is now live on the PVRTune webpage

PVRTune has gone public!

// April 4th, 2011 // No Comments » // Developers, News, Tools and SDK

After previously being available under NDA, PVRTune – the POWERVR SGX performance analysis tool – is now publicly available!

This begins with the Linux ARM and X86 SGXPerfServer (the device side component of PVRTune) currently available for download, but we will be gradually introducing SGXPerfServer for other OS’s over the coming weeks (including Android and Symbian).

PVRTune is available for download from the utility’s page on our website, so feel free to grab a copy without NDA restrictions!

POWERVR Insider SDK v2.8 is now available

// March 21st, 2011 // No Comments » // Developers, News, Tools and SDK

Version 2.8 of the POWERVR Graphics SDK is now available for download!

New features include the following:

• 64-bit utilities for Linux (Collada2POD CL/GUI, PVRShaman, PVRVFrame and PVRTexTool CL/GUI)
• Android SDK: Modified Android SDK to build with NDK build scripts
• PVRTexLib: 64-bit for all supported platforms
• PVRTexLib: Fast compressor is now thread safe
• PVRTexLib & PVRTexTool: Performance and stability improvements
• PVRTexLib & PVRTexTool: Independent texture channel loading
• PVRShaman: Render to texture functionality
• PVRGeoPOD: plug-ins for Max and Maya 2011
• PVRGeoPOD: plug-in for 32-bit MacOS Maya
• PVRTrace: Specify a start and end frame for recording
• PVRTrace: Specify if you want to record with or without data (e.g. don’t store textures, etc)
• PVRTrace: Android compatible recording libraries
• PVRTraceGUI: Tracked render state (OGLES2 only)
• PVRVFrame: Implemented workaround for ATI Windows Vista/7 10.12 Catalyst drivers issues
• PVRVFrame: MacOS port
• PVRUniSCo: New profile data – Accurate cycles emulation, primary attributes and secondary registers
• PVRUniSCo & PVRUniSCoEditor: MacOS port
• Training courses: OGLES2 EdgeDetection
• Training courses: OGLES2 BinaryShader (example use of the GL_OES_get_program_binary extension)
• Demos: OGLES2 Navigation3D (example use of real-world 3D navigation data, provided by Navteq)
• Tools: Added support and optimisations for 3D data to navigation tools

For more information, please visit our full release notes page

Adieu, GDC 2011!

// March 10th, 2011 // No Comments » // Developers, Events, Games

Wow! Thanks to all the POWERVR Insiders and new comers who visited us at GDC 2011. The show was amazing with too many high points to list. A big thanks though to all the developers who featured POWERVR content and supported us at the show including Adobe, Blackberry, EPIC, Sony, Transgaming, NAVTEQ, Intel, Khronos, Unity, Google and others.

Our session was standing room only, with folks queing outside in the hope of being ‘1 out, 1 in’. Our annual party was shoulder to shoulder too – it’s a good job there’s great camaraderie between Insiders. Thanks to all who joined us at Jillian’s.

We launched v2.8 of our SDK at the show and have away 1000 copies to GDC’ers. For those who missed out it will be at www.powervrinsider.com shortly.

We will be back for GDC 2012 of course – bigger and better. But before then there’s going to be plenty of other developer activities, so watch this space.

GDC 2011 starts in one week

// February 22nd, 2011 // No Comments » // Test Category

If you are visiting GDC 2011 next week why not come along and learn from the experts in mobile graphics? Attend our session on the 28th or please contact louise.jose@imgtec.com if you’d like to arrange a one to one meeting with our development engineers or company representatives at the show.
Or if you can’t make that, please join us for our annual party at on the 1st.
Full details of both below.

Understanding POWERVR SGX Graphics Technology and Optimizing for Great Graphics Performance (Presented by Imagination Technologies)

Speaker/s: Joe Davis (Imagination Technologies) and Gordon MacLachlan (Imagination Technologies)

Day / Time / Location: Monday 28th February 4:15- 5:15 pm Room 120, North Hall

Imagination’s POWERVR SGX and SGX MP graphics IP is a crucial part of today’s consumer electronics market, integrated into a wide variety of the latest mobile, computing and embedded products. Now – with new POWERVR Series6 cores, codenamed ‘Rogue’ on their way and multi-core SGX MP devices already coming to market in smartphones, tablets and games consoles it is becoming increasingly important for developers to understand how to take advantage of this hardware architecture in their applications.

The aim of this session is to give an expert insight into the POWERVR SGX and SGX MP Tile Based Deferred Rendering architecture and explain to developers how they can use the PVRTune analysis utility, and best programming practice, to optimize their applications for todays mobile devices.

Please note that an eligible GDC pass is required to attend this session: Audio Pass, Main Conference Pass, Summits and Tutorials Pass, All Access Pass

The Annual POWERVR Insider Party!

During GDC we’re inviting all mobile developers to help us celebrate over 400 million POWERVR enabled devices!

Meet members of the 22,000 strong POWERVR Insider ecosystem for a drink and a chat. Find out what other leading mobile developers are planning and try to remember what was said the next day ; )

For full locations details RSVP to louise.jose@imgtec.com
And don’t forget to visit us at booth 824 to receive your free and fully featured POWERVR Insider SDK DVD.

..

DevTech at GDC 2011

// January 19th, 2011 // No Comments » // Developers, Events, Games, News

Hello one and all,

With GDC 2011 rapidly approaching it seems like as good a time as any to give this blog some much needed love and attention.

As has become tradition Imagination will be taking part in the GDC Smartphone Summit (yes, even though they’ve changed the name again) and will be sending over DevTech engineers to soak up interesting sessions and seize the opportunity to have one-on-one discussions with developers. We are especially looking forward to seeing both those we rarely have the opportunity to meet in person and new comers that can benefit from the direct support. We will also have a stand during the main Expo, as well as the Summit, so feel free to stop by to discuss current and upcoming devices, performance recommendations, the freely available SDK suite we provide for graphics development and optimization or just to talk about any interesting projects you may be working on

If you would like to book a meeting during GDC to discuss any problems you may be experiencing or for performance recommendations from our experienced engineering staff, drop an email into devtech@imgtec.com with “GDC 2011 meeting” as the subject, and we’ll try to find a suitable slot for you. Additionally, Imagination will be holding a social event during an evening of the conference week to chat with developers in a more casual environment (and to have a few beers ). The details are currently TBC, but if you stop by our stand at the Summit and ask about it we can let you know more.

The future has arrived!

// September 7th, 2010 // 4 Comments » // Developers, Games, News

Humble beginnings

When I joined Imagination Technologies in early 2008, I vividly remember our VP of Marketing, Tony King-Smith, talking about mobile 3D graphics moving towards photorealism; rapidly catching up with high-end games consoles.

Looking at the software offerings supporting graphics hardware acceleration at the time, that must have seemed like crazy talk to a lot of people.

But we have come a long way…

As you might know, the first mobile product with 3D hardware acceleration was the Dell Axim X50V. The Axim X50V was sporting our POWERVR MBX core as early as December 2004.

Going backwards from there, I wonder what reception our CEO Hossein Yassaie received, when he around 2001 tried to sell the idea, that of course you would need powerful 3D capabilities in a mobile. Jetpacks and flying cars anyone?

In hindsight, his vision was spot on, and has since then gained massive momentum.

The first sightings

The first time I noticed people favourably comparing games on POWERVR platforms to consoles, was with Firemint’s Real Racing. Australian mobile veterans Firemint produced a stunning racing experience, and the games press was quick to heap on the praise.

I witnessed it running on both the original iPhone and the Nokia N95. Mind you, these were still POWERVR MBX platforms with none of all the floating point architecture and shader goodness POWERVR SGX does so well.

Pushing it

With the proliferation of the next generation of our POWERVR hardware, many, many other games came and further pushed the envelope. Still, knowing what the POWERVR SGX core is capable of, we knew that the upper performance ceiling was still some way off.

In 2009 we asked our long time friends from Digital Legends Entertainment to produce a set piece to demonstrate just how close to the console experience you can get on our current generation graphics hardware.

The resulting demo, called ExtremeBall, is chockfull of all the effects we take for granted on high-end games consoles: Radiosity lighting, water shader with refraction and reflections, bloom, advanced skin shaders, character animation with mesh deformation skinning and well over 1 million polygons per second. And barely breaking a sweat on an iPhone 3GS!

All together now

At the Develop conference in Brighton another mobile games veteran and POWERVR Insider, Michael Schade, CEO of Fishlabs stated that, “within a year we will have mobile devices with rendering capabilities superior to the Xbox 360.” I was sitting in the audience, and inadvertently I thought, “has he seen our roadmap?”

Of course before that, the internet had been awash with videos of Epic Games’ Unreal3 engine demo running on an iPhone – and if you attended Apple’s WWDC in June, you were treated to even more stunning examples of just how close we are to closing the gap up to high-end consoles and PCs.

Lately it has been one glorious example after another:

Quakecon gave us John Carmack’s amazing demonstration of the Rage engine running on an iPhone. The status quo of POWERVR hardware was effectively summarised by the seminal 3D visionary of our time:

“I could kill anything on a previous generation console, like an Xbox or a PS2 or something, on the hardware that’s there. It’s not as powerful as the current generation, but it is not all that far off.” – John Carmack

On Wednesday we of course saw another stunning example in the Epic Citadel demo, developed by Epic Games.

High-end console graphics on a mobile? Is it possible? Are there any doubters left?

Wait till you see what we are working on…

It has been an amazing journey for the POWERVR team; all the way from the SEGA Dreamcast days to today’s unbelievable graphics performance on mobile and embedded platforms. We are of course massively proud of our technology, and just as amazed as anybody else, at the experiences our many, many talented 3rd party developers create with it.

But we have just gotten started. The next-next-next generation graphics technologies we are working on at any point in time will be around 5-6 years away from shipping consumer products. Knowing how powerful the next POWERVR graphics technologies will be, we can confidently say that you haven’t seen anything yet! Very soon, we’ll see devices with our multi-core SGX XT, which can scale to almost any level of performance needed. All in the palm of your hand.

Ladies and gentlemen, the future has arrived. No jetpacks or flying cars, but you will get unbelievable games experiences on your mobile devices. Why should your mobile experience be inferior to your home experience?

Go forth and develop something amazing on the many, many POWERVR platforms. The graphics will not be the limiting factor!

Prelims

// July 5th, 2010 // No Comments » // News

We just announced our prelims the other day.

http://www.imgtec.com/corporate/newsdetail.asp?NewsID=559

Over the past 12 months (to 30 April 2010), Imagination Technologies increased group revenue with 26%, with royalty revenue up a whopping 75% and licensing of new technologies keeps on trucking, despite the very cautious economic landscape we carefully navigate.

Here at Imagination Technologies we are of course very proud of such a brilliant result, and we have worked hard for it.

But what does that actually mean for our 3rd party developers?

Chips with our technology embedded increased 47% to 126 million units shipped. That is spread across more than 180 different products in mobile, 15 TV models, 90 netbooks/tablets etc.

In short: POWERVR has long been the de facto standard for graphics acceleration on embedded devices, and the number of products with POWERVR technology keeps on climbing rapidly – as does the areas of use. You might have learned about the POWERVR graphics architecture for the first waves of smart phones with graphics hardware acceleration, such as the Sony Ericsson M600i or Nokia N93, or maybe even back in the SEGA Dreamcast days, but that knowledge is quickly becoming very valuable in new and different product categories such as personal media players, navigation devices, digital TVs or set-top boxes, tablets, MIDs and notebooks and many, many more.

If you have just joined us recently, now is a good time to familiarise yourself with developing for POWERVR technologies. It is only going to get bigger from here on…