// 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.
// 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
// 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!
// 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
// 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.
// 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.
// 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!
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