Imagination Demos at GDC 2013
March 25, 2013, Game Developers Conference, San Francisco—We talked with Imagination Technologies about their latest releases. The hardware and software company is working on more features and capabilities in all their products.
First, they announced the release of the latest version PowerVR Graphics SDK (software
development kit) v3.1. The SDK includes tutorials, source code, extensive documentation, platform abstraction frameworks and a highly integrated suite of tools. The new PowerVR Graphics SDK v3.1 fully supports the development of applications using the Khronos OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0 and 3.0 APIs on devices integrating Imagination’s PowerVR Series5, Series5XT and Series6 GPUs. The free PowerVR Graphics SDK v3.1 is available for download now at www.powervrinsider.com.
The earlier versions of the Power tools have gotten acceptance at a critical mass, and the new SDK includes new features in PVRTune performance analyzer, support for PowerVR Series6 GPUs, renderstate override, an new UI, and improved counter descriptions. The Tracer now includes full support for OpenGL ES 3.0, pixel picker, shader analysis, trace file editing and splitting, platform playback, and more.
In addition to the SDK, they had some of the latest demos from PowerVR Insider partners; and an array of new PowerVR-enabled devices. They also demonstrated the Caustic Series2 R2500 and R2100 ray-tracing acceleration boards and the accelerated Caustic Visualizer family of plugins. These boards bring the interactive real time ray tracer to the working viewports of the 3D design and animation packages revolutionizing workflows with fully-interactive ray traced viewports.
The Caustic R2500 OpenRL PC board, including a copy of one Caustic Visualizer, will be priced at US$1495, targeting the latest high-end workstations. The Caustic R2100 board, including a copy of one Caustic Visualizer, will be priced at US$795, intended for upgrading a wider range of midrange and higher workstations. Both Caustic boards will ship with a copy of the Caustic Visualizer for Maya at launch. The software-only version of the Caustic Visualizer for Maya will be priced at US$299.
Imagination is working with open standards groups to enable easier transfer of assets from creator to the game environment. In addition to the Open GL work, they are also working with the Open RL group to enable interfacing content through a single, uniform interface. The RL API is designed to facilitate high performance interactive ray tracing using both software and hardware accelerated renderers . It is available today as a free SDK that includes a software implementation running on x86 devices. The complexities are buried so the user is not faced with the intricacies of interface development.
