Graphics acceleration cores bring realism to games

Imagination Technologies has displayed implementations of its licensable 3D, video and display IP technologies capable of delivering stereoscopic 3D experiences at the British Embassy in Seoul, Korea.

The demonstrations made use of the rendering capabilities of Imagination's PowerVR SGX graphics acceleration family and the video decode and enhancement capabilities of the PowerVR VXD video decoder and FRC frame rate conversion IP cores.

The PowerVR SGX graphics acceleration cores are said to be ideally suited to stereoscopic 3D (S3D) graphics, either using single- or multi-processor cores for resolutions up to full 1,080p HD, and are capable of supporting all commonly used S3D formats such as frame sequential, side-by-side, top-bottom and interlaced.

Using SGX it is possible to upgrade existing 3D content to deliver full S3D, bringing new realism to 3D games and navigation, and new possibilities for user interfaces in a range of applications.

The PowerVR SGX tile-based deferred rendering architecture is ideally suited to deal with the increased demands of S3D, which include twice the geometry processing workload and commensurate increases in fill/texturing workload.

The scalable nature of the SGX architecture and its ability to efficiently support multiple contexts ensure that the best possible S3D user experience can be achieved using SGX-powered devices, while maintaining SGX's low-power, high-performance credentials.

Imagination also demonstrated its PowerVR FRC frame rate conversion cores providing advanced image enhancement and a seamless S3D viewing experience with no frame judder.

FRC270 is claimed to be the smallest frame rate conversion (FRC) solution available, capable of full HD at 240Hz.

It has been optimised to provide full stereo 1080P60 output from typical 1080P24 stereo sources (for example Blueray 3D - Profile 5).

The multi-stream video decoding capabilities of Imagination's PowerVR VXD also make it ideally suited to both active and passive S3D, where the realistic 3D effect is created using two fields, each containing almost identical images.

However, Imagination Technologies said VXD is capable of going beyond the requirements of S3D video (where the two streams are in identical source formats) by being able to decode multiple streams of differing formats for applications such as dual-screen output of multiple video sources or picture-in-picture HD.

This enables the capabilities of VXD video decoders to be more useful across many applications compared with other S3D video decode solutions that only decode S3D content.

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