In short; it's still on.
It's still going to be Series 5 and related to SGX.
Regarding SGX (bear in mind that this is chip desgned for PDAs and mobile 'phones):
Source
Demos:
Water Demo
City Demo
Bump Mapping Demo
MRT Deferred Shading Demo
...
It's still going to be Series 5 and related to SGX.
Regarding SGX (bear in mind that this is chip desgned for PDAs and mobile 'phones):
PowerVR SGX - Overview
------------------------------------------
The PowerVR SGX Wireless Graphics Accelerator IP family is a range of cores specifically developed to meet the next-generation requirements of mobile embedded graphics and video processing. The PowerVR SGX family is based around a fully programmable Unified Scalable Shader EngineTM, enabling a feature set that exceeds the requirements of OGL 2.0 and Microsoft Shader Model 3, enabling 2D, 3D and video processing in a single core.
PowerVR SGX builds on the inherent benefits of the tile based rendering architecture found in PowerVR MBX, already the de facto standard for mobile graphics. Among the many benefits of this architecture are low memory bandwidth, exceptional performance, industry-standard software support, market leading image quality and low power demands. The underlying PowerVR SGX architecture is fully scaleable for a range of area and performance targets and covers the entry-level feature and basic phones up to smartphones and advanced feature phone market segments.
PowerVR SGX - Key features
-----------------------------------------------------
* Unified Scalable Shader Engine (USSE) combines vertex and pixel shading in a single processing unit maximizing performance for available silicon area through automatic load balancing.
* Enables advanced geometry and pixel processing capabilities such as procedural geometry (e.g. HOS) and textures, advanced per pixel and vertex lighting effects (e.g., shadows, parallax bump mapping, etc.). The programmable architecture allows acceleration of other multimedia related tasks (e.g. image processing). This unified approach to processing uses a single unified-programming model with one compiler, reducing hardware and software qualification time.
* Latency tolerant architecture geometry and rasterisation processes decoupled using tile-based rendering enabling on-chip processing of costly hidden-surface removal and deferred pixel shading No pixel shading of non-visible pixels, eliminating all unnecessary accesses to off-chip memory, with on-chip processing of multiple render targets.
* Image Quality Internal True Colour operations to be performed on-chip using high precision maths at arbitrary pixel precisions up to IEEE 32bit floating point combined with comprehensive programmable image anti-aliasing for free.
* Video processing for free, with the programmable architecture providing extensive accelerated functions support for multi-standard video decode and encode.
PowerVR SGX - Product family
------------------------------------------
Family Members
PowerVR SGX core architecture is fully scaleable and the Wireless Graphics Accelerator family includes 3 variants: SGX510, SGX520, SGX530 with sizes ranging from less than 2mm2 to 8mm2 in a 90nm process.
Performance
Maximum effective pixel fillrate performance from 200Mpix/sec to 1200Mpix/sec @ 200MHz with even higher Z and stencil fill rate and polygon throughput from 2Mpoly/sec to 13.5Mpoly/sec @ 200MHz. Performance depends on core and configuration selected.
Power
PowerVR SGX cores are built on a foundation of unique patent-protected technologies that deliver class-leading performance while keeping power dissipation to a minimum. In addition, sophisticated clock gating power management techniques ensure the lowest active and standby power consumption.
PowerVR SGX - Software support
----------------------------------------------
API and OS Support
All industry standard graphics APIs and OSs supported, including:
* OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenGL ES 1.x, OpenGL 2.0, OpenVG
* Direct3D Mobile, DX9+
* JSR 184 and JSR 239
* Linux, Symbian, WinCE, Windows Mobile
Content Compatibility
PowerVR SGX510, SGX520 and SGX530 are compatible with content created for PowerVR MBX. Powerful features like the Vertex Shader and PVR-TC texture compression are compatible with the MBX family. Continued support for all existing PowerVR extensions to OpenGL ES 1.1, allows comprehensive software support developed on the MBX platform to be carried forward to SGX.
Source
Demos:
The following demos show the advanced shader based capabilities of the PowerVR SGX family, illustrating the advanced visual quality achievable on next-generation mobile platforms.
Water Demo
The advanced vertex and pixel shading capabilities of the PowerVR SGX family make realistic cinematic scenes a reality as illustrated by this seascape. This demo approximates wave physics using a Perlin Noise based function to displace a tessellated grid and create per-pixel waves. For accurate reflections and refractions advanced render to texture functionality is required. The final water surface is obtained by combining reflection and refraction renders in an advanced per-pixel lighting model including a per-pixel Fresnel calculation.
City Demo
The skyscrapers rendered by this demo illustrate the shader capabilities of the PowerVR SGX family. The buildings feature accurate multiple light-source per-pixel Phong lighting, including parallax bump-mapping, detail textures, specular highlights utilising specular power and specular level or colour maps, per-pixel fog and environment mapping utilising cube maps.
The realism and beauty of the scene is boosted by the use of a post-processing bloom effect: implemented by raising the rendered pixel values to a power, then using the automatic MIP-map generation functionality of the hardware to create blurred variants of this, the result of which is summed to the original render, causing the brightest highlights of the scene to glow.
Bump Mapping Demo
This demo illustrates the massive increase in visual quality offered by PowerVR SGX advanced shader technology. The stack of three blocks on the left illustrates basic texture mapping as is offered by competing products. The blocks in the centre illustrate DOT3 per-pixel lighting where the diffuse lighting calculations are done at the per-pixel level rather than the per-vertex level; the PowerVR MBX technology offers this level of quality. Finally the blocks on the right side show parallax bump-mapping with per-pixel diffuse and specular lighting. Parallax bump-mapping is an advanced technique that produces a proper parallax effect when the camera pans across a surface. This approximates the visual quality of displacement mapping, but with no increase in polygon count; for this reason this technique is sometimes referred to as virtual displacement mapping.
MRT Deferred Shading Demo
Traditional rendering algorithms submit geometry and immediately apply shading effects to the rasterised primitives. Complex shading effects often require multiple render passes to produce the final pixel colour, with the geometry submitted every pass. Deferred shading (a.k.a. Quad Shading) is an alternative rendering technique that submits the scene geometry only once, storing per-pixel attributes into local video memory to be used in the subsequent rendering passes. The storage requirements for these attributes exceed the buffer space offered by a normal colour buffer; for this reason Multiple Render Target (MRT) functionality is used. MRTs allow the pixel shader to store results in multiple buffers at the same time, massively increasing the amount of output storage. In later passes, screen-aligned quads are rendered and the per-pixel attributes contained in the buffer are retrieved at a 1:1 mapping ratio so that each pixel is shaded individually. The PowerVR SGX family allows the usage of on-chip MRT buffers resulting in minimal usage of power and performance costly off-chip bandwidth and storage requirements.
...