PowerVR

PowerVR is a division of Imagination Technologies (formerly VideoLogic) that develops hardware and software for 2D and 3D rendering, and for video encoding, decoding, associated image processing and DirectX, OpenGL ES, OpenVG, and OpenCL acceleration.

PowerVR accelerators are not manufactured by PowerVR, but instead their IP blocks of integrated circuit designs and patents are licensed to other companies, such as Texas Instruments, Intel, NEC, BlackBerry, Renesas, Samsung, Sony, STMicroelectronics, Freescale, Apple,[1] NXP Semiconductors (formerly Philips Semiconductors), and many others.

[dubious – discuss] This method has the advantage that, unlike a more traditional early Z rejection based hierarchical systems, no calculations need to be made to determine what a polygon looks like in an area where it is obscured by other geometry.

Today, the PowerVR software and hardware suite has ASICs for video encoding, decoding and associated image processing.

[3] Newest PowerVR Wizard GPUs have fixed-function Ray Tracing Unit (RTU) hardware and support hybrid rendering.

The single-chip PCX1 was released in retail as the VideoLogic Apocalypse 3D[7] and featured an improved architecture with more texture memory, ensuring better game compatibility.

This was followed by the further refined PCX2, which clocked 6 MHz higher, offloaded some driver work by including more chip functionality[8] and added bilinear filtering, and was released in retail on the Matrox M3D[9] and Videologic Apocalypse 3Dx cards.

There was also the Videologic Apocalypse 5D Sonic, which combined the PCX2 accelerator with a Tseng ET6100 2D core and ESS Agogo sound on a single PCI board.

The PowerVR PCX cards were placed in the market as budget products and performed well in the games of their time, but weren't quite as fully featured as the 3DFX Voodoo accelerators (due to certain blending modes being unavailable, for instance).

[13] The Neon 250 features inferior hardware specifications compared to the PowerVR2 part used in Dreamcast, such as a halved tile size, among others.

The refresh STM PowerVR3 KYRO II, released later in 2001, likely had a lengthened pipeline to attain higher clock speeds[14] and was able to rival the more expensive ATI Radeon DDR and NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS in some benchmarks of the time, despite its modest specifications on paper and lack of hardware transform and lighting (T&L), a fact that Nvidia especially tried to capitalize on in a confidential paper they sent out to reviewers.

[16][17][18] KYRO II could also perform Dot Product (Dot3) Bump Mapping at a similar speed as GeForce 2 GTS in benchmarks.

[19] Omissions included hardware T&L (an optional feature in Direct3D 7), Cube Environment Mapping and legacy 8-bit paletted texture support.

16-bit output quality was excellent compared to most of its competitors, thanks to rendering to its internal 32-bit tile cache and downsampling to 16-bit instead of straight use of a 16-bit framebuffer.

However, due to its unique concept on the market, the architecture could sometimes exhibit flaws such as missing geometry in games, and therefore the driver had a notable amount of compatibility settings, such as switching off the internal Z-buffer.

Apart from a clockspeed boost, this refresh was announced with a "EnT&L" HW T&L software emulation, which eventually made it into the drivers for the previous KYRO cards starting with version 2.0.

The STG5500 KYRO III, based upon the next-generation PowerVR4, was completed and would have included hardware T&L but was shelved due to STMicro closing its graphics division.

[23] These mobile chipsets with MBX IP in turn were used in several high-end cellphones and smartphones, including the original iPhone and iPod Touch (with Samsung S5L8900), Nokia N95 and Motorola RIZR Z8 (with TI OMAP 2420), and the Sony Ericsson P1 and M600 (NXP Nexperia PNX4008).

Using the SGX graphics chipsets helped Intel to successfully achieve the ultra-low power budgets required for passively cooled devices, such as smartphones, tablets and netbooks.

[27] Introduced in 2014, the PowerVR GX5300 GPU[28] is based on the SGX architecture and is the world's smallest Android-capable graphics core, providing low-power products for entry-level smartphones, wearables, IoT and other small footprint embedded applications, including enterprise devices such as printers.

ST-Ericsson (now defunct) announced that its Nova application processors would include Imagination's next-generation PowerVR Series6 architecture.

[33] The Apple A7 SoC integrates a graphics processing unit (GPU) which AnandTech believes to be a PowerVR G6430 in a four cluster configuration.

PowerVR Series6XE GPUs[37] are based around Series6 and designed as entry-level chips aimed at offering roughly the same fillrate compared to the Series5XT series.

PowerVR Series7XT GPUs[44] are available in configurations ranging from two to 16 clusters, offering dramatically scalable performance from 100 GFLOPS to 1.5 TFLOPS.

PowerVR Series7XT Plus GPUs are an evolution of the Series7XT family and add specific features designed to accelerate computer vision on mobile and embedded devices, including new INT16 and INT8 data paths that boost performance by up to 4x for OpenVX kernels.

The GPUs are designed to offer improved in-system efficiency, improved power efficiency and reduced bandwidth for vision and computational photography in consumer devices, mid-range and mainstream smartphones, tablets and automotive systems such as advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), infotainment, computer vision and advanced processing for instrument clusters.

The new GPUs include new feature set enhancements with a focus on next-generation compute: Up to 4x higher performance for OpenVX/vision algorithms compared to the previous generation through improved integer (INT) performance (2x INT16; 4x INT8) Bandwidth and latency improvements through shared virtual memory (SVM) in OpenCL 2.0 Dynamic parallelism for more efficient execution and control through support for device enqueue in OpenCL 2.0 PowerVR Series8XE GPUs support OpenGL ES 3.2 and Vulkan 1.x and are available in 1, 2, 4 and 8 pixel/clock configurations,[45] enabling the latest games and apps and further driving down the cost of high quality UIs on cost sensitive devices.

New GPUs improve the performance/mm² for the smallest silicon footprint and power profile, while also incorporating hardware virtualization and multi-domain security.

The Series9XE family is targeted for set-top boxes (STB), digital TVs (DTV) and low end smartphones SoCs Note: Data in table is per cluster.

[52] The Series9XEP family targets set-top boxes (STB), digital TVs (DTV) and low end smartphones SoCs.