PowerVR Performance Recommendations Introduction

These recommendations are aimed at developers who wish to get the best possible graphics performance from their applications running on PowerVR hardware. The recommendations range from the fairly high-level to very low-level, and have varying amounts of performance gain.

The reader is introduced to the optimal development approach when considering performance, including how to go about analysing an application's performance.

Further areas covered include:

• Vulkan-specific optimisations.

• OpenGL ES-specific optimisations.

• 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, and more.

• Tips related to subjects such as balancing workloads, on-chip memory performance, and register pressure.

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 are a set of more generic performance recommendations that all graphics developers should seek to implement. Developers should also aim to observe as many of the techniques and principles mentioned. This should help produce well-behaved, high-performance graphics applications.

These rules can be found as part of the Introduction to PowerVR for Developers.