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PowerVR demonstrate x2 to x16 core GPU chip for mobile devices!

@ Pottsey - I know about tile based rendering and it's nothing new.
AMD use tile based rendering for Crossfire... did you even know this? and TBR has been around since atleast the early 90's but it's never taken off with desktop/laptop GPU's apart from with crossfire. And even with that, Crossfire doesn't really work much or any better than NV's SLI which isn't tile based.

As for ray tracing - NV have demoed real-time raytracing, any CPU from Intel or AMD can raytrace. My 980X CPU can raytrace in real-time if i render a low complexity scene, infact any CPU could do this if it's at a low enough res and complexity. So claiming a GPU can raytrace is meaningless, what matters is what it can raytrace in real-time and at what res.

Tile based rendering means PowerVR can be 1/3 the raw speed of ATI/ Nvidia with 1/3 the power needed and 1/3 the cooling yet match them for speed or over take them in 3D.
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... yet theres absolutely no evidence of this anywhere to back it up. Infact PowerVR cards from the 90's were tile based, yet they could not even match the high end GPU's from NV at the time, let alone be 3x more powerful.
I dont know why you deny what happened to PowerVR in the desktop market in the 90's... there cards could not compete on performance, it's a well known fact for anyone who was around at the time. I can even link you to ancient reviews that will prove my point. There drivers were also appalling. No one bought them because of these reasons, sales were bad - another fact.

If PowerVR and TBR are so great, why is no one else on this forum or anywhere else remotely interested? why do PowerVR not compete in high-end GPU/performance areas? Where are the amazing looking demo's showing off PowerVR's tech? Why dont even any of the consoles use PowerVR anymore?
 
MR.B said " ... yet theres absolutely no evidence of this anywhere to back it up. Infact PowerVR cards from the 90's were tile based, yet they could not even match the high end GPU's from NV at the time, let alone be 3x more powerful. "
No evidence apart from just about every single PowerVR desktop cards we had? Not to mention all the whitepapers explain how the tile based cards work. It seems most of the old reviews are no longer up but here is a thread of people talking about the Kyro's speed.

http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1008997

The Kyro as one of many examples had specs well below a Geforce 1 but ran at speeds between around a Geforce 2 GTS or Ultra most of the time.
Geforce 2 GTS has a 800 Mpixels/s fill rate. Ultra has a 1000 Mpixels/s fillrate. Yet a Kyro 2 with a low 350M pixiel fill rate and SDR ram would often run as fast as a Geforce 2 GTS and in high overdraw games run faster than Ultra's. Only in the most basic simple games did it drop to speeds of a Geforce MX but even a Geforce MX has far higher specs.

Yes ATI use some tile based rendering type features but it's not a tile based card. If you think putting two none tiled based cards together makes a tile based card you clearly don't understand what a true full tile based card is or the benefits of tile based rendering.

ATI might render the screens in tiles but they still have two none tiled based cards doing the work.



MR.B said " No one bought them because of these reasons, sales were bad - another fact."
Sales were great in the millions, drivers were great and the card was popular. The problem was ST who at the time made over 6billions decided that the desktop graphics card market is too small to bother with any more compared to its other divisions.

As for "NV have demoed real-time raytracing, any CPU from Intel or AMD can raytrace. My 980X CPU can raytrace in real-time if i render a low complexity scene, infact any CPU could do this if it's at a low enough res and complexity."
I hardly call 0.63fps realtime and that was on a single NV high end GPU. I guess it realtime but it's unusable. On the flip sides Imagination Technologies old generation very low speed 75Mhz chip was demonstrated doing real-time raytracing around about 23x faster than the CPU or Nvidia high end chip.

They say the 2nd generation chip is 14X. faster and at some point this tech will be implanted in future generations of mobile GPU. That's far in advance of Nvidia or the CPU. I would be very surprised if PowerVR are not the first to get 30fps real-time raytracing on a single cheap chip. All evidence says PowerVR are massively ahead of everyone else in this area. PowerVR are in double digit FPS's while Nvidia are under 1 FPS when useing a single GPU setup.



MR.B said " could not even match the high end GPU's from NV at the time, let alone be 3x more powerful."
As I recall and looking back I am correct PowerVR budget card was a match for NV mid to high end cards. So I think its safe to say a high end PowerVR card would have been x3 faster then a high end NV card. Pretty much every review talks about how you get more for less with PowerVR.


MR.B said "why do PowerVR not compete in high-end GPU/performance areas? Where are the amazing looking demo's showing off PowerVR's tech? Why dont even any of the consoles use PowerVR anymore? "
PowerVR are an IP company. They have technology that does compete in high-end GPU/performance areas but being an IP company they business module does not work like ATi or Nvidia. If the rumours are true PowerVR have been chosen in the next generation of consoles over ATi and Nvidia. Time will tell if this is true. We know a licence has been taken out but it's not been 100% confirmed.
 
Downloaded on the Ipad and appart from it looking "pap" as Raven puts it it also plays like "pap"... Thought I would come up with loads of good chat about the Power VR chip but most of what I would have said has already been said. Needless to say I side with Drunken and Mr.B on this one.

Pottsey.... Seems a while since ive seen you around.... is this your new baby instead random chat of Physx?
 
Hi pottsey i remember the kyro 2 card well i had one while my mates had nvidia and they couldnt bieleve how fast my cheap card was.
I think what killed them off was lack of hardware t and l and the time?
Tbh its all over the net , its not just pottsey that saying powervr could have real time raytracing soon they have bought out the company ( caustic) that developed the tech that accelerates the raytracing.
Ok maybe it wont take over desktop gfx but this is a gfx forum and we should be interested about new tech and not dissing it wether it comes from amd or nvidia or not ?
Thanks pottsey for bringing this to our attention made good reading , oh and btw guys ok physx didnt take off like promised but play batman aa to see how much difference it could make and all pottsey evry said was it would make a huge diference to games and with batman it did ....only one standout game but yeah was far better!
 
BSN has this article about SONY choosing powerVR GPU for its upcoming PSP 2 within the next 12 months.

"For instance, a quad-core version SGX543MP4 at only 200 MHz frequency delivers 133 million polygons per second and offers fill-rate of four billion pixels per second [4GPixel/s], in the range of GeForce 8600 cards. For that matter, 4GPixel/s runs 40nm GeForce GT210 [2.5 GPixel/s] into the ground. Given that GeForce GT210 runs at 589 MHz for the core and 1.4 GHz for shaders. Since PowerVR SGX543 targets handheld devices, there is no saying what the performance plateau is.
An eight core SGX543MP8 at 200 MHz delivers 266 million polygons and eight billion pixels per second, while faster clocked version, for instance, at 400 MHz would deliver 532 million polygons and 16 billion pixels per second. 16 billion pixels per second equal GeForce GTX 260-216, for instance."

This at least theoretically says and take with a grain of salt, that PVRs' GPU has scaling capabilities that can propell it onto the cuthroat desktop market with this multicore GPU.4,8,16 cores cand go from low to mid-high cards if BSN speculated performance analisys is at least half right.

If anything then at least it could replace the incredible low performing onboard sollutions out there.
 
rippling said:
Hi pottsey i remember the kyro 2 card well i had one while my mates had nvidia and they couldnt bieleve how fast my cheap card was.
I think what killed them off was lack of hardware t and l and the time?
Tbh its all over the net , its not just pottsey that saying powervr could have real time raytracing soon they have bought out the company ( caustic) that developed the tech that accelerates the raytracing.
Ok maybe it wont take over desktop gfx but this is a gfx forum and we should be interested about new tech and not dissing it wether it comes from amd or nvidia or not ?
Thanks pottsey for bringing this to our attention made good reading , oh and btw guys ok physx didnt take off like promised but play batman aa to see how much difference it could make and all pottsey evry said was it would make a huge diference to games and with batman it did ....only one standout game but yeah was far better!
Click to expand...



Hmmmm all i remember in batman aa with full phys-x enabled were a few pieces of paper and some movable smoke..........played it through with both full phys-x on and again with it off, Hardly a huge difference and barely even worth bothering about imo. Just some nailed on cheap features which many other games have done without phys-x
 
RavenXXX2 said:
Low res textures in rage HD, PsP games look way better.
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The PSP has a res of 480*272, all screen shots look better at low res :) The iPhone4 is esp a bad example with its super high res.

How about Dungeon defenders on the SGS? (still unreal 3)
dungeon-defenders.jpg


or how these future tegra 2 based games?
http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/07/nvidia-shows-off-tegra-2-gameplay-on-atrix-4g-and-optimus-2x/

Altough they're masters in low power solutions It would be awesome if powerVR came back to the desktop market :D Didn't they do the Dreamcast? edit:whoops ty mr.b
 
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ive still got my kyro 2 and yes thanks pottsey a very interesting read mobile gpus seem to be in the same situation as the early 3d desktop cards , exciting times indeed . i just wish battery tech could match . ah well cant have everything

cheers
 
BTW Rage for mobile is nothing like Rage for the PC - the engine has more in common with the original unreal engine techical feature wise (other than more advanced lighting) than the PC version of Rage, same with the mobile version of the unreal engine its a very lite version thats similiar to the original Unreal engine just better lighting.
 
VinceB1 I have always been a PowerVR fan boy, this is nothing new. I just find the technology very interesting. I am just trying to stry up some interesting graphics talk that isn't just Nvidia or ATI. I fully admit I could be wrong on some points especially when it comes to estimated time frames.
 
Me too! and props for getting some type of conversation going in the graphics forum (should've posted in mobiles tbh) but your rather mad to suggest GPUs designed for low power envelops will ever match something powered by the mains... :p

Lets hope they can do something special with raytracing! (either in the desktop, console or mobile space)
 
But how does it fare vs the Tegra2? especially in things like Hd 1080p decoding and stuff?

Power to the VR i had 2x Kyro's a hercules and a videosomething one that actually had TV out!! Those were the days'_#
 
Nickg said "But how does it fare vs the Tegra2? especially in things like Hd 1080p decoding and stuff?"
PowerVR are well beyond the Tegra2. Nvidia them self said Tegra2 is 10 to 20% faster than the PowerVR SGX540. Various sources say a single SGX543 core is double the speed over the SGX540 and the SGX543 comes with x2 cores. That should mean PowerVR are around x3 to x4 faster than Tegra2 all the while running at a much lower cloak speed.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/17/more-details-emerge-on-apples-a5-chip-for-upcoming-ipad-2-and-i/

http://channel.*****.net/content/item.php?item=28491 more info. both sites say the SGX540 is x4 the speed over current generation.

As for 1080p HDMI that's the default output spec.
 
Vinni3 @H|H said "lolwat?
That's some pixel density - nearly as high as a 30" LCD! If it could be made, which it can't, it would cost more than you can imagine."
What do you call this then? http://www.screentekinc.com/Acer_As...-inch--2048x1536-qxga-laptop-lcd-screen.shtml
There are various reference online to the iPad2 replacement screen costing 3x the price of the current iPad screen. Apple are well known for doubling the screen resolution with an aim to reach just over a 300 DPI.
http://www.macrumors.com/2011/01/15/ipad-2-screen-likely-to-have-2048x1536-resolution/ explains more with evidence for a 2048x1536-resolution. 2048x1536 is double the current Ipad resolution and double size"x2 iPad graphic have been found in iBooks 1.2. There are also links for double Iphone graphic suggesting that to is getting another doubling in resolution.

EDIT: I have not done much shopping around for best price but the screen seems to cost around $69.99. This needs confirming
EDIT:http://www.247laptoplcd.com/servlet/the-93395/ACER-ASPIRE-ONE-PRO/Detail Around $54 or $44 on Ebay.
 
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2048x1536 res for the iPad 2 is not that unlikely given that the iPhone 4 would still have a higher pixel density.

Still, a 2048x1536 LED backlit LCD with IPS tech is not gonna be cheap.
 
I will be god damn impressed if they manage to acquire a 2048x1536 IPS panel whilst still retaining Apple's famous markup.
 
Pottsey said:
VinceB1 I have always been a PowerVR fan boy, this is nothing new. I just find the technology very interesting. I am just trying to stry up some interesting graphics talk that isn't just Nvidia or ATI. I fully admit I could be wrong on some points especially when it comes to estimated time frames.
Click to expand...

It wasn't a personal snipe or anything like that mate but I do mainly remember you from from the epic Physx debates of the forum. As for power power vr, they do very well in their space so doubt they have the ambition anymore, once bitten twice shy possibly? I would love them to re-enter the market but just don't think they will.

Either way it made an interesting read so thanks :)
 
Did type out a big explanation but can't be arsed, basicaly any gaming on phones n tablets is CRAP so powervr for gamers is completely irrevelent except for farmville atm.
And yes I have one in all the iPhones round the house. Crashes more than my desktop...
 
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