PowerVR Performance Recommendations Introduction

Document Overview

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

  • Shaders.

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

• OpenGL ES-specific optimisations.

• Vulkan-specific optimisations.

The PowerVR Family

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.

The Golden Rules

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