PowerVR Developer Documentation

The PowerVR platform is designed to provide outstanding performance at low cost. To help you make the most of developing for PowerVR platforms, we’ve created extensive documentation to introduce you to the basics of graphics APIs, guide you through our suite of tools, and help you get the best performance out of your application.

Getting Started with PowerVR and Graphics APIs

Learn about Imagination’s PowerVR technology, or follow one of our tutorials to familiarise yourself with the OpenGL ES and Vulkan APIs.

Introduction to PowerVR for Developers

Introduction to the history and architecture of PowerVR, including a high-level overview of Tile-Based Deferred Rendering (TBDR).

Getting started with OpenGL ES

Introduction to the OpenGL ES API, including a step-by-step guide and code examples for creating a simple graphical application.

Getting started with Vulkan

Introduction to the Vulkan API, including a step-by-step guide and code examples for creating a simple graphical application.

PowerVR Optimisations and Recommendations

Get the best performance out of your applications through individual performance recommendations, industry-specific performance guides, software standards, and hardware specifications.

PowerVR Performance Recommendations

Extensive recommendations to help developers improve graphics performance, including Vulkan development.

PowerVR Low Level GLSL Optimisation

Low-level ways of further optimising GLSL code for PowerVR Rogue architecture.

PowerVR Compute Development Recommendations

A brief guide outlining how to optimise applications for compute tasks on PowerVR hardware.

PowerVR Tools Manuals

User manuals and quickstart guides to accompany our suite of tools. You can find all PowerVR Tools in the Downloads page.

PVRCarbon User Manual

A guide to PVRCarbon, our API tracing and debugging tool for Vulkan, OpenGL ES, and OpenCL applications.

PVRTune User Manual

A guide to PVRTune, our profiling and analysis tool for graphics applications.

PVRScope User Manual

A guide to PVRScope, the PowerVR utility library.

PVRTexTool User Manual

A guide to PVRTexTool, our texture compression and processing tool.

PVRStudio User Manual

A guide to PVRStudio, our fully-featured IDE for debugging on a mobile or embedded GPU.

PVRVFrame User Manual

A guide to PVRVFrame, our lightweight and simple OpenGL ES and EGL emulator for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

PVRRayTracingSimulation User Manual

A guide to PVRRayTracingSimulation, a collection of layers and binaries for emulating ray tracing-capable hardware on PowerVR.

PowerVR SDK

Documentation to accompany the PowerVR SDK, an open source codebase to help with the development of graphics applications for PowerVR and other platforms. For more information, see the PowerVR SDK GitHub Repository.

PowerVR SDK Documentation

A complete guide to the PowerVR SDK, including introduction to features and dependencies, build instructions, code examples, and reference manuals for the framework libraries.

PowerVR Reference Documentation

Additional documentation to help you get the most out of developing for PowerVR platforms.

PowerVR Supported Extensions for OpenGL ES and EGL

A reference of all of the OpenGL and EGL extensions supported by the PowerVR reference driver implementation.

PowerVR Instruction Set Reference

A reference for the assembly code which drives the uSC component of the PowerVR architecture.

PVR File Format Specification

A reference of the individual elements of the compressed texture format, PVR.