The PowerVR Advantage

PowerVR is the name of the graphics hardware IP family from Imagination Technologies. The ethos behind PowerVR has always been efficiency and technique, over brute force. All generations are based on Imagination’s patented Tile Based Deferred Rendering (TBDR) architecture. The core design principle of the TBDR architecture is to keep the system memory bandwidth requirements of the graphics hardware to a bare minimum.

As data transferred to and from system memory is the biggest cause of graphics hardware power consumption, any reduction made in this area will allow the hardware to operate at a lower power. Additionally, the reduction in system memory bandwidth use and the hardware optimisations associated with it, such as using on-chip buffers, enables an application to execute its render at a higher performance than other graphics architectures.

Due to the balance of low-power and high-performance, PowerVR graphics cores are dominant in the mobile and embedded devices market.