TIDMIMG
Imagination Technologies Group PLC
19 March 2014
19 March 2014
Imagination Technologies
Imagination Technologies delivers revolution in graphics with
new Wizard family of PowerVR Ray Tracing GPUs
Disruptive technology enables interactive cinematic realism for
mainstream devices
Game Developers Conference, San Francisco, CA - 19 March, 2014 -
Imagination Technologies (IMG.L) delivers a revolutionary new
family of graphics IP cores that raises the bar for ray traced
graphics to a dramatic new level, delivering astonishing realism
and performance at mobile power budgets.
Wizard cores enable more immersive games and apps with real-life
dynamic lighting models that enable advanced lighting effects,
dynamic soft shadows, and life-like reflections and transparencies,
previously unachievable in a mobile form factor. PowerVR Wizard Ray
Tracing IP is highly scalable, making it disruptive to many other
markets beyond mobile.
The new PowerVR Wizard graphics architecture is a significant
addition to the lineup of market-leading PowerVR graphics
processors (GPUs), which are already present in over half of the
world's smartphones and tablets.
The Wizard architecture is a ray tracing-enabled version of the
PowerVR Series6XT Rogue architecture which adds significant new
features to the pipeline, enabling accurate real time modelling of
fully dynamic lights and shadows. Everything developers know and
love about the PowerVR Rogue architecture is present in Wizard
GPUs, enabling them to start to use ray tracing without extensive
new learning.
PowerVR GR6500 is the first member of the new Wizard family of
cores designed to bring real-time, interactive ray traced graphics
to a broad range of consumer and mobile platforms, as well as
gaming consoles and mainstream gaming PCs, workstations and
servers.
Hossein Yassaie, president and CEO of Imagination, says:
"Imagination's highly-efficient PowerVR GPUs have played a key role
in driving the creation of entirely new categories of mobile
devices. Now we are changing the game again by bringing the next
level of realism to mobile and consumer devices. Our ray tracing IP
is here, and it's ready for our licensees and developers to begin
creating a new wave of immersive and exciting PowerVR-based
consumer experiences."
Highly anticipated IP poised to transform the state-of-the-art
in graphics
Enabling ray tracing capability in consumer devices required a
fundamental breakthrough in the algorithms used within ray tracing,
as well as the careful addition of optimized fixed function blocks
in the GPU to allow ray tracing operations to be performed within
the power consumption and bandwidth budgets available in today's
mainstream consumer devices.
With Imagination's Wizard Ray Tracing family, patented custom
hardware engines ensure the GPU's processor clusters are kept free
to run sophisticated shaders, producing stunning results with
minimal developer effort. The unique hardware ray tracing
processors, including coherence gathering engines, fixed function
intersection testing array and accelerated scene hierarchy
generator, receive rays from the shaders, determines their
intersection and initiates more shaders. All of this is made
possible with entirely dynamic scenes through the addition of a
novel hardware pipeline to build scene hierarchies required for ray
tracing in parallel with other operations, all while remaining
compatible with existing programmable vertex operations.
With all of these additions, Wizard cores address the real-world
use cases of ray tracing with fully interactive dynamic content and
photorealistic lighting. The net effect is an architecture that can
perform ray tracing operations around 100 times as efficiently as
performing the same operation using GPGPU functionality.
PowerVR GR6500 delivers:
-- Ray tracing: 300 MRPS (million rays per second) and 100 MDTPS
(million dynamic triangles per second) at 600 MHz
-- Shading: Four Unified Shading Clusters (USCs), with 128 ALU
cores delivering in excess of 150 GFLOPS (FP32) or 300 GFLOPS
(FP16) at 600 MHz
-- PowerGearing G6XT for advanced power management and dynamic resource allocation
-- PVR3C(TM) triple compression technologies (PVRTC and ASTC for
texture compression, PVRIC for frame buffer compression, PVRGC for
geometry compression)
-- Deep Color support for very high image quality at Ultra HD resolutions and beyond
Through the advanced architecture of PowerVR Wizard, multiple
ray tracing engines and shaders operate concurrently to ensure real
world sustained performance for both ray tracing and shading.
Further cores will follow that offer smaller power and area
footprints for more constrained environments, along with scaled up
cores to deliver fully ray traced content for the ultimate in
cinema quality graphics. All Wizard cores are designed to provide
leading support for a range of APIs such as OpenGL ES 3.x, OpenGL
3.x, Direct3D 11 Level 10_0, OpenCL 1.x, and OpenRL 1.x.
PowerVR Ray tracing: creating new opportunities for
developers
In addition to the clear benefits for traditional game engines
through the easy addition of many high quality and dynamic shadows,
reflections, transparencies, global-lighting, ambient occlusion and
more, PowerVR Wizard GPUs can enable a broad range of other
capabilities that would either be impossible, low quality or too
inefficient using standard techniques. Examples include lens
distortion correction, lenticular display rendering,
multi-perspective rendering, targeted rendering to points of
interest, line-of-sight calculations, collision detection and
more.
The combination of efficient shading clusters and low-bandwidth
ray tracing will enable a giant step forward for developers, who
can bring a new level of quality and enhanced realism to their apps
and games. For example, ray tracing can add a superior shadowing or
lighting solution to existing games while allowing game developers
to preserve the vast majority of the investment that they have
already made in their game engines and tools. In addition, dynamic
generation of assets in-game will streamline the content creation
workflow and save distribution costs by reducing the size of the
game files.
David Helgason, CEO of Unity Technologies says: "Unity
integrated Imagination's ray tracing software into the Unity 5
editor due to its high performance on the broadest range of
consumer laptops, ease of integration and unique future hardware
roadmap. We will continue to work with Imagination to fully utilize
the PowerVR Ray Tracing GPU IP within the Unity game engine to
further enhance the in-game experience and simplify content
creation for our developers."
James McCombe, director of research for PowerVR Ray Tracing at
Imagination, says: "While PowerVR Wizard ray tracing GPUs are a
disruptive technology, they remain as familiar and easy to use as
the PowerVR GPUs that developers are already using. With PowerVR
Wizard IP, the ray tracing capabilities are exposed directly
through the existing programmable shading hardware, so that
software developers can take advantage of the ultra-fast ray
tracing for some effects, while continuing to leverage the
substantial investment in software designed to run on GPUs already
available in the market today."
Matt Pharr, co-author of 'Physically Based Rendering, from
Theory to Implementation' and Academy Award Honoree, says: "The
PowerVR Wizard architecture from Imagination is a remarkable
advance: it promises to deliver both high-performance and
energy-efficient ray tracing to developers, in the context of a
regular GPU that can rasterize efficiently and still has
high-performance shader cores. By making ray tracing available to
all developers that use this platform, the Wizard architecture
offers the possibility of a quantum leap forward in image quality
in mobile interactive graphics applications."
While power-efficient enough for mobile applications, the
PowerVR Wizard architecture is able to scale up to configurations
capable of rendering interactive cinema for high-end gaming
machines and consumer devices.
Says Yasuhiro Kondo, general manager, Arcade Machine
Development, SEGA Co Ltd.: "SEGA welcomes the announcement of
PowerVR Ray Tracing IP from Imagination Technologies. We expect
that the Wizard cores will create a great revolution in the
graphics experience of the gaming market."
Availability
The PowerVR Wizard GR6500 core is available for licensing now.
Contact info@imgtec.com for more information.
About Imagination Technologies
Imagination is a global technology leader whose products touch
the lives of billions of people throughout the world. The company's
broad range of silicon IP (intellectual property) includes the key
multimedia, communications and general purpose processors needed to
create the SoCs (Systems on Chips) that power all mobile, consumer,
automotive, enterprise, infrastructure, IoT and embedded
electronics. These are complemented by its unique software and
cloud IP and system solution focus, enabling its licensees and
partners get to market quickly by creating and leveraging highly
differentiated SoC platforms. Imagination's licensees include many
of the world's leading semiconductor manufacturers, network
operators and OEMs/ODMs who are creating some of the world's most
iconic and disruptive products. See: www.imgtec.com. Follow
Imagination on Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, RSS, Facebook and
Blog.
Imagination Technologies and the Imagination Technologies logo
are trademarks of Imagination Technologies Limited and/or its
affiliated group companies in the United Kingdom and/or other
countries. All other logos, products, trademarks and registered
trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Imagination Technologies' Press Contacts:
UK: David Harold david.harold@imgtec.com +44 (0)1923 260 511
USA: Jen Bernier-Santarini jen.bernier@imgtec.com +1 408-530-5178
This information is provided by RNS
The company news service from the London Stock Exchange
END
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