What the new PowerVR driver means for mobile | Hacker News Reader

What the new PowerVR driver means for mobile

tuxphones.com

52 pointsMartijnBraam11 comments

They are not very well known but they developed the first GPU with hardware ray tracing. They had HW ray tracing accelerators in 2013:

https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/146781-imagination-techno...

and GPU designs with HW ray tracing in 2014:

https://blog.imaginationtech.com/launching-ray-tracing-power...

Apple's GPUs are also based on this architecture:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15272/imagination-and-apple-s...

There have been some news about desktop GPUs as well:

https://videocardz.com/newz/innosilicon-graphics-cards-based...

FWIW, while Apple historically leaned very heavily on PowerVR tech, their modern GPUs don't have much in common with it anymore (even if they're still paying the license fees - probably to retain the right to manufacture older chips.)

IIRC Imagination threatened to sue Apple over use of its GPU tech - though I expect Apple meticulously avoided use of IMG IP, and IMG dropped it.

PowerVR also designed discrete video cards for PC's back in the day (Kyro II was a beast).

They also made the video chip in the Sega Dreamcast IIRC.

In case it's not obvious, the devices mentioned in this post are really old, like over a decade. The N900 was bad when it came out but by today's standards it's absolute garbage. PowerVR was almost completely killed off by Mali years ago.

PowerVR was in all iPhones when they were creating the "smartphone" category, til apple inhoused it a few years ago. Recently powerVR GPUs are in every low-end Android phone I've looked at. I expect they had to break into new markets, and dropped their margins til they could.

A site named "tuxphones" probably likes phones with slide-out keyboards, like the N9000. Though the driver isn't for that device.

Far from "over a decade", devices using A and B series aren't even out yet.

And the oldest one, GX6250, is from 2014 https://wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVR - less than a decade.

This article seems to have been written by an N900 fan who had the incessant need to mix in the N900 with reporting on an entirely unrelated PowerVR open-source driver for much newer GPUs.

It's nice that Imagination is discovering open-source to stop more of their hardware going to the landfill but seeing how they are walking dead since Apple dropped them (and took their best engineers) it's very much too little too late.

The PowerVR stuff is just very common for devices in that era, and the N900 is specifically the one I've seen questions about regarding the new drivers.

The GPU this driver is for is also only 2 years newer than the N900, not that far off :P

PowerVR still has some future since they're going for risc-v SoCs now where Mali doesn't exist.

My guess it, it's a sign of Mesa reaching the point where developing Vulkan driver leveraging SPIR-V to NIR translation gives hardware vendors benefits they don't get trying to invent their own approaches. They focus on NIR to their machine code compiler part and Mesa does the rest of heavy lifting for them. Plus OpenGL support comes basically as a free bonus through zink.

Likely, it's not that they suddenly started liking FOSS, but they can sell it to their bean counters as a cost benefit which happens to be a great thing for Linux ecosystem of course.

More about why NIR could play an important role here: https://www.jlekstrand.net/jason/blog/2022/01/in-defense-of-...

Flashback to the HTC Kaiser days…

Hah that's even some years older than the stuff I work with. Since that's qualcomm SoC I guess it's not using PowerVR though

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