Talk:PowerVR

Untitled

The end of this page talks a lot about "AIBs" - can anybody make that more clear? What is an AIB? ThomasHarte 14:34, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

AIB stands for Add-in-Board. An AIB supplier is someone who takes a (typically graphics) chipset and builds a graphics card around it. It's pretty much a Value-added reseller for graphics cards. Cmdrjameson 18:10, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps worth mentioning some drawbacks of the tile-based renderer? Ones from the top of my head: tile memory is preallocated on the video RAM of the card, reducing the amount available for texturing. This would also place a hard-limit on the total number of polygons able to be submitted per frame, after which no more polygons could be drawn. More awkwardly, this also puts a hard-limit on the maximum number of polygons allowed per-tile; which is far less predictable in practice. On the Dreamcase either of these conditions would just cause a run-time exception. As I understand it on the PC, such an exception was dealt with by transporting all the polygon data back over the PCI bus to the main PC; allocating more video RAM (potentially swapping out textures etc) and then re-submitting the polygon data. This would cause a major delay in rendering. TheMoog 14:29, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

If the scene buffer overflows, the scene gets rendered in multiple passes. All the scene data collected so far will be used to render the first pass, storing depth and color buffers for subsequent passes. However, there are techniques like metatiling that help prevent such a situation. 20:46, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Does Intel 2900G carry the codename "Stanwood"? If so, it is based on MBX not SGX. 20:46, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Infinite plane rendering

I remember reading in initial Dreamcast articles that "infinite plane rendering" was an important part of the technology. Can information be added about this?

Lazy8s: Infinite planes support was dropped after PowerVR Series 1, actually. They were a more flexible way of defining objects of which polygons were just a subset. Application designers, however, were overwhelming more familiar with conventional systems, so the later generations were optimized to deal with just triangles and quadrilaterals in Series 2 and eventually just triangles with Series 3.

Incorrect Info about the OMAP2420

There seems to be a mistake concerning the omap2420's components. The FPU is not the TI c55x DSP at 220 MHz. The FPU (called VFP) is an extension to the ARM11 core. The c55x DSP of the omap2420 which is a seperate core can't even do floating point operations (only 16-bit fixed point) :P Y3Ah27 (talk) 02:56, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

Hardware that does not take advantage of MBX/MBX Lite

There are some systems that even though they have MBX or MBX Lite they don't take advantage of it.

Some Samsung phones with OMAP2430 (i520, i550, i560, g810) for example, use a generic OpenGL ES driver (by NOKIA) which doesn't use MBX Lite. No acceleration is present on these phones and there will not be unless either Samsung or a 3rd party releases new firmware with updated OpenGL ES driver.

I've been told that this is also true for some Nokia phones. Only difference is that they use an OMAP2420 where MBX is disabled. I don't know which models are affected in that case. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.65.144.234 (talk) 10:58, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Series 6

I removed the series 6 section, as it had just the text "Nothing officially announced". If there is stuff "unofficially" announced, feel free to re-add the section, this time citing some sources of the rumours' origins. Jalwikip (talk) 10:16, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Confusing information.

 See Dreamcast which BEGAN development in 1997, and Nintendo 64 retail release in 1996. Nintendo 64 used the RCP (Reality Co-Processor) "is 
 one of two main chips for the Nintendo 64 (the other being the NEC VR4300). It was developed by Silicon Graphics for Nintendo." Nintendo 64:"The 
 RSP is a MIPS R4000-based 8-bit integer vector processor." 

The PowerVR PCX2 is same series as NEC embedded MIPS processors found as coprocessor on e.g. intel ethernet cards. The PowerVR series 1 chips were available before the VR2 series chip in Dreamcast.

Shjacks45 (talk) 11:52, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Sorry where is the quote "The PowerVR PCX2 is same series as NEC embedded MIPS processors" located? PCX1 and PCX2 had nothing to do with NEC's line of MIPS CPUs (except that there was a system under development that used MIPS chips as the host CPU and for T&L acceleration).

Simon Fenney (talk) 09:09, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

KYRO and KYRO II

I think it's worth noting that these chips are share identical technologies, with the KRYO II being produced on a smaller process giving it higher core clock frequencies. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.15.87.56 (talk) 01:44, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

Series5 (SGX)

• SGX530 (14 MPolys/s, 500Mpx/s@200MHz) for the handheld mobile market
• SGX531
• SGX535 (28 MPolys/s, 1Gpx/s@200MHz, Max Memory Band (GB/s) 4.2GB/s) for handheld high end mobile, portable, MID, UMPC, consumer, and automotive devices (Intel calls it the GMA 500)
• SGX540 (twice performance of SGX530)

According the infos I found SGX540 has twice the processing units of SGX530 - but since it also has an improved design it's more than twice as fast. I found 90 million triangles/sec stated on a Samsung Website (http://samsungi9000galaxys.com/gaming-on-the-galaxy-s-powervr-sgx540-next-generation-moblie-gpu/) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.217.2.79 (talk) 09:12, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

copyright violation?

the text in this article can be found word for word at this website. as can the text in the List of PowerVR products, which i have nominated for deletion considering the same information is covered in less detail in this article. not sure if this constitutes a copy vio as the user who posted the info on enotes.com could have also been the user who created the two articles on wikipedia. even the images on that website is link back to the wiki files used in this article. any thoughts? should this article also be nominated for deletion? it is completely unsourced and does appear to only really promote the companies website in addition to the copy and paste editing. WookieInHeat (talk) 04:41, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

after looking on google news there are numerous WP:RS discussiing the company, no need to nominate this article for deletion. but still, maybe a user more versed in wikipolicy could look over all this info to identify any infractions. cheers WookieInHeat (talk) 04:56, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

Isn't this more of a case of enotes plagiarising the Wikipedia article? 12.232.17.226 (talk) 15:12, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

At least today, the enotes article clearly cites Wikipedia as the source. So, the article here does not violate copyright, as it was the source to begin with. I will remove the nomination for deletion. - Johnlogic (talk) 23:31, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

Controversy surrounding GMA 500

There should be some content here about the manufacturer's refusal to continue creating Linux drivers for this closed-API chipset, and about Intel's falling-out with the company due to the bad press Intel gets for not getting the real manufacturer to support the GMA 500, a relabelled PowerVR. Millions of netbooks are unable to upgrade to or otherwise install a current Linux kernel and GNU/Linux distribution (due to X server version, library deps, etc) because of this. As a result, they must run old, unsupported software that places them at a security risk due to known vulnerabilities in these old versions.

-128.61.83.190 (talk) 09:17, 24 November 2010 (UTC)