PowerVR

PowerVR Technologies is a division of Imagination Technologies (formerly Video Logic ) and developed graphics solutions for personal computers, arcade machines, mobile phones and game consoles. The company licensed this intellectual property to other manufacturers, further develop these then into finished products.

History

PowerVR Technologies was created on 31 August 1999 after a corporate restructuring of the graphics development division of video Logic.

Over the last ... PC graphics card Kyro II ...

Graphics unit ... to the Centrino Atom platform

And ... the use in today's mobile devices.

Technology

PowerVR used a special technique, the so-called tile- based deferred rendering, so a tile -based deferred rendering. The deferred rendering has the same effect as the hidden surface removal (HSR ) modern immediate renderer such as the Nvidia GeForce series or AMD's Radeon series, namely that non- visible polygons ( covered by others) before rendering to be discarded, so that bandwidth and fill rate is saved. In order to optimize this effect, PowerVR shares a 3D scene into a plurality of tiles on, and in each tile of the HSR -like operation is performed.

This technique makes it possible to surpass the competition graphics chips that have higher performance. Since it is in the production of appropriate graphics chip but always relied on a licensee, there are often delays until a new generation reaches the market.

Products

Series 1

The Series 1 was used only for the two PC graphics chips NEC PowerVR PCX1 and PCX2. These two chips were 1996 and 1997 on the market.

Series 2

Just six months after the NEC PowerVR PCX2 was also still 1997, the Series 2, so the next generation announced, and related products should be timely coming on the market. The Series 2 was used for arcade machines, game consoles and PCs: The NEC CLX2 in the Sega Dreamcast and Sega NAOMI arcade devices and NAOMI 2, as well as NEC Neon 250 for PC graphics cards. Since the console chip had a higher priority, the PC graphics chip was not until 1999 on the market and was no longer competitive.

Series 3

In June 2000, a new licensee for the Series 3 the PowerVR technology was announced with STMicroelectronics, and a whole family of graphics chips, ST Kyro, has been developed.

Series 4

As the exclusive licensee of the Series 4, STMicroelectronics, withdrew from the graphics business, no graphics chips have been developed on this basis. PowerVR announced in the fall of 2002 announced that all developments in Series 4 were discontinued.

Series 5

Instead, they concentrated on the development of the Series 5 Series 5 is to be a high-end graphics chip, which among other things also has pixel and vertex shader 3.0. With Sega was found in the spring of 2004, a licensee for the arcade area, but none for the PC sector. Sega had his license also unused.

MBX

SGX

PowerVR SGX is the successor to the MBX and based on an improved SGX Series 5 features unified shaders, which even go beyond Shader Version 4.0 Direct3D 10. Also, OpenGL 2.0, OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenVG with the Extension Pack 1.0.1 & 1.1 is fully supported. The chip is available in eight power levels and was the licensee of its predecessor gain for themselves. These supply the current generation of mobile devices such as Apple iPhone 3GS, Nokia N900, Palm Pre and Samsung Wave.

Since it is a very flexible design with the PowerVR SGX, Intel also attacked for his first Centrino Atom platform on this basis as a complement to its Intel System Controller Hub in the form of Poulsbo GMA 500/US15W back. Here the SGX535 PowerVR graphics core with the video chip VXD370 was combined. In the Intel outsourced to Tungsten Graphics Driver development is, however, apparently made ​​use only of the few ways the graphics unit. In his successor PineView Intel now uses again a variation of its own graphics chip ( GMA 3150 as a designated, marginally modified GMA 950).

Sony uses for its current handheld console PlayStation Vita also based on the SGX architecture graphics chip with the name SGX 543 MP4 . This is a equipped with four instead of two graphics cores and PowerVR SGX 543 optimized variant of MP2, which is built into the iPhone 4S.