Imagination announces POWERVR Insider SDK 2.5

Major upgrade includes support for latest SGX powered phones, new demos and more

September 22; 2009 -- Imagination Technologies, a leading multimedia chip technologies company, has released version 2.5 of its industry leading POWERVR Insider SDK (software development kit).

The POWERVR Insider SDK is developers' preferred development environment for the creation of OpenGL ES 2.0 as well as OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenVG applications. It includes a complete PC-based emulation environment, and is backed by Imagination's unrivalled technical support team.

This release includes OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 SDKs for a number of new phone platforms using POWERVR SGX, including iPhone (running on Mac OS X), Samsung i8910, Sony Ericsson Satio, Nokia N900 and Beagle Board SDKs which give developers access to the world-class POWERVR Insider toolchain.

Other new features include new Displacement Mapping and Shadow Mapping training courses and new Fur and Coverflow demos, as well as many updates and functionality improvements. The latest V2.5 version of the public SDK is now available to the POWERVR Insider community through the dedicated website www.powervrinsider.com.

Inside the SDK

The POWERVR Insider SDK - a public domain version of the SDK provided to Imagination’s POWERVR graphics licensees - comprises a comprehensive set of utilities, extensive training courses, stimulating demos – many in source code form - and extensive documentation. The toolchain has been continually honed over many years for stability and ease of use, resulting in unrivalled robustness, productivity and usability.

Imagination’s powerful graphical shader environment PVRShaman comes with many new features for increasing productivity in this release, New built-in models minimise the need to load 3D models for testing shaders, and the user now has the ability to view loaded 3D data in numerical form for closer inspection of low-level properties of the model. PVRShaman also now supports full blending controls enabling more extensive complex scenes to be prototyped.

The SDK includes source code for an extensive library of helpful 3D functions, used in many of the example applications, that significantly reduce application development time and increase productivity. This latest release further extends this library in response to extensive developer feedback.

PVRGeoPod – the plugin for exporting geometry from industry standard 3ds Max and Maya - now supports the latest versions and has added support for spotlights and materials with all the different map types, such as specularity, glow, bump and gloss.

The PVRShell platform abstraction framework has also been further extended to support more platforms, making it easier than ever to port to new development and target devices.

The SDK’s popular PC emulation libraries, which are also shipped by a number of third-parties as part of their SDKs, now come with a control window which gives extensive debug options as well as the ability to stop and pause applications. Developers can toggle renderstates to wireframe and select profiles for different hardware setups.

POWERVR Insider members who are also licensees of POWERVR SGX graphics technologies or who work closely with Imagination’s semiconductor licensees also have access to a more comprehensive version of the SDK that includes the latest versions of PVRTune, an advanced utility that gives unprecedented visibility of applications at both hardware and driver levels. PVRTune is a remote hardware performance profiler for POWERVR SGX platforms used to graph counters, both on-chip and within drivers, in real time, enabling unrivalled performance tuning capabilities for SGX-powered chips with suitably enabled drivers.

About Imagination Technologies

Imagination Technologies Group plc (LSE:IMG) – a global leader in multimedia and communication chip technologies – creates and licenses market-leading processor cores for graphics, video, multi-threaded embedded processing/DSP and multi-standard communications applications. These semiconductor intellectual property (IP) solutions for systems-on-chip (SoC) are complemented by strong array of software tools and drivers as well as extensive developer and middleware ecosystems. Target markets include mobile phone, handheld multimedia, home consumer entertainment, mobile and low-power computing, and in-car electronics. Its licensees include many of the world’s leading semiconductor and consumer electronics companies. Imagination has corporate headquarters in the United Kingdom, with sales and R&D offices worldwide. See: www.imgtec.com.