// 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
// 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!
// 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…
// June 16th, 2010 // No Comments » // News
Welcome to the POWERVR Insider blog!
How do you best communicate with 18,000 members?
Of course the answer to that question is a lot of different things.
Our developer community is immensely important to us. We have always maintained that good apps make our technology shine. The amazing application support from the developer community is a very big part of the success and penetration our technologies have in the marketplace.
What is important to their reality, is incredibly important to us.
So how do you best pick the brains of 18,000 developers? How do you best communicate with 18,000 developers?
I wish I had the time to communicate personally with each and every one of you. Obviously that is not the case. So it is important for our work supporting our developers that we keep working and experimenting with different means of communication with our members; to best serve our developer community with the means we have available.
I enjoy very much attending trade shows, conferences and exhibitions, which allows me to meet face to face with a good number of our developers. Nothing really beats good old analogue face to face communication for building relationships, but the reach is unfortunately very limited. So in addition we have used a number of different methods of communication:
Our POWERVR Insider newsletters have been well received in our community since their inception in 2005. However, a newsletter is in nature a mono-directional format of communication, and we don’t learn very much about our developers from this form of communication. Newsletters excel in delivering information, which is not awfully time sensitive and where greater level of detail is needed.
We also use mail shots on occasion. Mail shots are used to direct attention to time critical opportunities such as an impending submission deadline of a competition. We try to limit the use of these, because we do realise that a lot of people do not welcome getting occasional unsolicited emails. In terms of two-way communication, our mail shots have however started very good and ultimately fruitful discussions with our developers.
Our Twitter channel is used for fast and tiny bites of information. Since starting last year it has enjoyed good and steady growth and we will continue to use this interesting tool. However Twitter is also mostly a very mono-directional form of communication.
The forums on the POWERVR Insider website is used for concrete trouble shooting and assistance among members of our community as well as our DevTech support team. The forums do tend to be a place where developers are happy to submit suggestions. However with the public nature of forums, longer and meaningful conversations can only go so far before confidentiality becomes an issue. The forums are also unique in the way that they allow our 3rd party developers to engage with each other.
Enter of our latest initiative: The POWERVR Insider blog.
I want to use the lovely flexibility and speed of a blog to communicate about any and everything of value to our developers. In particular it offers us the opportunities of writing substantial commentaries from trade shows and conferences while being on the road. Another aspect I am looking forward to is the rich opportunities for our members to comment on and discuss blog posts, and thus turning this into bidirectional communication. We work with many influential and visionary developers, whom I would like to engage to write occasional guest blogs here. So welcome to the POWERVR Insider blog, I hope you will enjoy it, and above else find it useful for your development work. Let your voice be heard in the comments, so we can keep keeping it relevant to your work.
… and if all else fails, feel free to email me on marquepierre.sondergaard@imgtec.com with questions, comments and suggestions.
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