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.
