A little product renaming here, a little RISC-V magic there, some extra performance, and voila – Imagination's 10th-gen PowerVR is born Imagination will today launch the tenth generation of its PowerVR family, with GPU cores aimed at rendering 3D graphics and other imagery for all sorts of stuff, from phones and cars to PCs and servers. There are a number of things to note with this particular roll out, which essentially marks Imagination's comeback bid after …
It's just the system management core, the same as Nvidia are doing, not the actual GPU cores like Think Silicon announced
https://think-silicon.com/2019/12/02/think-silicon-demonstrates-early-preview-of-industrys-first-risc-v-isa-based-3d-gpu-at-the-risc-v-summit/
Still, good to see, and there will be more and more things like this.
Twice I've had PowerVR chips in my machines:
An eeePC (1101HA to be exact), which had abysmal graphics performance under Linux because the Intel chipset incorporated Imagination silicon, and they wouldn't/couldn't release accelerated drivers for linux
...so I might give these a wide berth
Yeah, my first accelerator card was an m3D as well, back in the day. Wasn't too impressed with it after the first few minutes.
Then I got a VooDoo 2 and never looked back.
Still, it's good to know that they've been improving. This new gen is no m3D, that's for sure, but it won't be beating the RTX 2080 any time soon.
I seem to recall I had an STB graphics card in my Gateway 2000 Pentium 2 computer about 20 odd years ago, and that had an S3 Virge chipset. The STB drivers for the card were utterly awful - seconds per frame performance. I managed to track down the reference chipset drivers from S3 and they were superb with decent 3D performance. I can still remember playing Touring Car on that machine, to the envy of my friends at University!
I was trying to remember where I'd heard of PowerVR (and there's a name that was coined back in the first VR 'boom'), and then I remembered, GMA 500 integrated graphics in Intel Atom CPUs. Slow and poorly supported.
Intel never bothered releasing updated drivers for them, and they're probably mostly responsible for the terrible reputation of integrated graphics and Atom CPUs to this day. Terrible hardware.
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