The Game Developer Conference is a highlight of the year for anyone involved in the graphics world and naturally, Imagination is there, located at booth S763, at the Moscone Center, in San Francisco.
If you’re looking to find out a little more about what’s coming from us in 2019 in term of GPU and AI, it’s a great opportunity to come and talk to us.
We have several demos on show at our new booth (complete with new look PowerVR logo!).
One of these is a showcase for augmented reality called ‘hangAR’. Running on a device based on our Furian GPU architecture, in the guise of the MediaTek Helio X30 SoC this is a simple but fun, pick-up-and-play AR application. You launch the app and point the phone camera at the PowerVR marker card and a scene comes alive in front of you of a space cadet, guarding a military hangar (hangAR – geddit?).
A floating sentry robot flies in and out of the door and generally gets in your face. Leave the guard alone, otherwise, she’ll be issuing some stern warnings! Mr floaty robot annoying you? Tap him a few times and while you’ll activate his shield he will eventually get the message and disappear back into the hanger to leave you alone. You can even look inside and around the hanger to get a real sense of space.
On the technical front, it shows off some nice depth of field effects and uses complex and dynamic lighting, with high-quality materials and shading. Another nice touch is how our new PVRMonitor plugin, which provides quick glance information on 3D, TA and shader loads, is built right into the scene – tap the screen to turn it on or off!
Meet Circuit Breaker
The other new demo is known internally as Circuit Breaker and is designed to show off the new features of the PowerVR Series9XM GPU. It’s running on a prototype device running a MediaTek P90 chipset, (also known as the MT6779), which contains, unsurprisingly, a PowerVR GM9446, which is a Series9XM.
This video shows a game-like experience of a ship moving through a ‘circuit’. While not fully interactive you can look around the environment. As the ship moves it name-checks many of the new features that are part of the Series 9XM. It is built on the Unity game engine and uses the new Unity Lightweight rendering pipeline, (an experimental feature), designed to allow Unity to be optimised for power-constrained architectures.
It looks good and shows what can be done on the Series9XM platform, with physically-based materials, dynamic shadow maps and particle effects, such as from the ship exhaust, sparks and explosions.
Also on the demo floor are demos such as our neural network-based object detection, our Rogue Swarm demo showcasing our Vulkan performance, and a rotating car demo showing how surround- view can be enabled with efficient, low-power GPUs.
You can also come and talk to us to find out more about the latest tools that make it easier to optimise your devices for PowerVR.
If you’re at the show be sure to head by the booth – S763. And while you’re there, why not challenge the team to a game of Pac-man!
After the show, you can find us on social media at Twitter @ImaginationTech, @PowerVRInsider, on Facebook, and LinkedIn.
