Introduction

This guide contains recommendations to help you get the best possible graphics performance from your applications running on PowerVR hardware. The recommendations range from high to low level, with varying amounts of performance gain.

We will first introduce the optimal development approach when considering performance, including how to go about analysing an application’s performance.

Further areas covered include:

• The best way to optimise geometry, textures and shaders.

• Optimisations for specific rendering techniques such as preferred lighting and preferred shadowing solutions, particle rendering, physically-based rendering, balancing, on-chip memory performance, and register pressure.

• OpenGL ES-specific optimisations.

• Vulkan-specific optimisations.

The recommendations presented here complement the Golden Rules, which are a set of generic performance recommendations that all graphics developers should seek to implement to produce well-behaved, high-performance graphics applications. The Golden Rules can be found in the Optimising for PowerVR section of the Introduction to PowerVR for Developers.

IMG A-Series, PowerVR Rogue, and PowerVR SGX are graphics core architectures from Imagination Technologies designed specifically for shader-based APIs such as OpenGL ES 2.0, 3.x, and Vulkan. Due to their scalable architectures, the PowerVR family spans a huge performance range.