Imagination Upgrades PowerVR's GPU Texture Compression

By Douglas Perry
published

Graphics chip IP company Imagination Technologies has released a new version of its texture compression engine for PowerVR Series5XT and Series6 GPU cores -- some of which are used in today's smartphones and tablets.

PVRTC2 is the first upgrade for the technology in almost a decade.

According to Imagination, PVRTC2 delivers improved image quality for textures with high contrast, large areas of significant color discontinuity, or boundaries of non-tiling textures, better support for pre-multiplied textures, support for arbitrary sized NPOT (Non Power Of Two) textures, and sub-texturing. The company believes that the changes will have a huge impact on the graphics capability of its IP as "up to 70% or more of a top game title may be textures" and the technology is able to compress them by a factor of 16.

Imagination said that the update compression engine not only improves file size and download times, but offers runtime performance and power consumption on mobile platforms such as smartphones and tablets as well. There are currently about 600 million PowerVR-based GPUs deployed worldwide.

Douglas Perry
9 Comments Comment from the forums
  • mcd023
    the title made me think of the SpongeBob episode where they were racing boxes using their imaginations. "You need to use your imaginaaaaaaaatiooooooonnn." haha
    Reply
  • blazorthon
    Nice to see PowerVR getting an overhaul.
    Reply
  • lockhrt999
    It's so ironic that company like Imagination tech which looks so tiny in front of nVidia produces stuff which is in multiple times faster than nVidia flag ship chipsets every time.

    I went to visit my friend in that company, I was really impressed. They are bunch of cool dudes.
    Reply
  • bloc97
    Zingam"There are currently about 600 million PowerVR-based GPUs deployed worldwide."Wow! NVIDIA sucks! BTW. It is unbelievable how crappy Tegra 3 GPU performance is! It is obvious that NVIDIA doesn't know how to make an efficient processor. All they know is put more transtors... and that's it!
    It is easy, remember this :
    For ultra-mobile :
    CPU = ARM
    GPU = ARM or PowerVR

    For desktops :
    CPU = Intel
    GPU = nVidia or AMD
    Reply
  • shin0bi272
    I would have liked to have seen some screencaps for comparison but its cool.
    Reply
  • pharge
    hmm... is this update included in the new PowerVR GPUs in the new A5X chip?
    Reply
  • kyuuketsuki
    Noob question: is this a 100% software thing that can be applied to existing hardware, or does this include hardware changes that mean it will only be for their GPUs from this point on, or...?
    Reply
  • A Bad Day
    I bet a patent troll has a patent that loosely mentions GPU texture compression...
    Reply
  • blazorthon
    KyuuketsukiNoob question: is this a 100% software thing that can be applied to existing hardware, or does this include hardware changes that mean it will only be for their GPUs from this point on, or...?
    Undoubtedly, hardware is being overhauled, not the software or at least not only the software. It will only be their newer GPUs.
    Reply