Imagination and Unity partner to bring Imagination's breakthrough ray tracing technology to real time, interactive games

Unity 5 will bring photorealistic graphics to a broad range of gaming devices

GAME DEVELOPERS CONFERENCE, SAN FRANCISCO, CA – 18 March, 2014 – Imagination Technologies (IMG.L) and Unity Technologies are broadening their partnership with a new multi-faceted agreement around Imagination’s groundbreaking PowerVR Ray Tracing technology and Unity’s industry leading game development engine that will bring photorealistic graphics to the mainstream gaming experience across a wide range of devices.

In an industry first, Unity has chosen Imagination’s real-time ray tracing technology to enable game creators to view in-game lighting effects with immediate feedback as they work with the upcoming release of Unity 5. Artists and game designers will, through integration of Imagination’s ray tracing technology in Unity 5, immediately see their work with accurate lighting that matches the final look of their game. The resulting games can be deployed across today’s existing devices.

In addition, Unity Technologies and Imagination have entered into a longer-term strategic collaboration to blend ray tracing capability seamlessly into the gameplay experience, enabled by consumer devices that integrate Imagination’s newly announced PowerVR Wizard Ray Tracing GPUs (graphics processors). Integrating ray tracing directly into the game engine through this hardware IP solution will lead to interactive game graphics that will look as realistic as CG movies do today. The PowerVR Wizard IP provides programmable ray tracing, accessible within the shaders running on the PowerVR GPU, enabling all mobile developers to trace rays freely within their existing applications, even in combination with existing rasterization methods.

Through the revolutionary and unique efficiency of the PowerVR Ray Tracing Wizard GPU architecture, ray tracing can now be used within the power consumption and memory bandwidth constraints of mobile and other consumer environments.

David Helgason, CEO of Unity Technologies says: “Unity integrated Imagination’s ray tracing software into the Unity 5 editor due to its high performance on the broadest range of consumer laptops, ease of integration and unique future hardware roadmap. We will continue to work with Imagination to fully utilize the PowerVR Ray Tracing GPU IP within the Unity game engine to further enhance the in-game experience and simplify content creation for our developers.”

James A. McCombe, GM and technical director, PowerVR Ray Tracing, Imagination, says: “Today we are seeing just the tip of the iceberg. While many games are just ‘more pixels, same look’ ray tracing technology delivers ‘prettier pixels’ and a new exciting level of realism and creativity to games. We are very pleased to have been able to work with our friends at Unity to provide the performance and integration needed to enable real-time lighting previews directly within the Unity 5 editor, especially on low profile laptops where power-intensive GPUs are not available. With the availability of our newly announced PowerVR Ray Tracing GPU IP, we continue to work together with Unity to ensure that their game engine takes full advantage of ray tracing hardware once it arrives in consumer devices.”

Unity will be shipping Imagination’s ray tracing software in every copy of the Unity 5 editor beginning this year.

About Imagination’s PowerVR Ray Tracing Technology
Imagination’s PowerVR graphics processors (GPUs) are the de facto standard for mobile and embedded graphics, having shipped in over a billion devices to-date. PowerVR Ray Tracing technology represents the next disruptive step in the evolution of graphics for a broad range of consumer and mobile platforms, as well as gaming consoles and mainstream gaming PCs, workstations and servers. The breakthrough technology enables more immersive games and apps with real life dynamic lighting models that enable effects such as dynamic soft shadows, realistic reflections and transparencies, and global-lighting, previously unachievable in a mobile form factor.

The PowerVR Wizard graphics architecture is a significant addition to the lineup of market-leading PowerVR GPUs, leveraging the combination of efficient shading clusters with low-bandwidth ray tracing to enable a giant step forward for developers. PowerVR Ray Tracing can be used alongside existing mainstream graphics techniques, allowing developers to preserve the vast majority of the investment that they have already made in their game engines and tools while enabling them to bring a new level of quality and enhanced realism to their apps and games.

About Unity Technologies
Unity Technologies is the creator of Unity, a flexible and high-performance development platform used to make creative and intelligent interactive 3D and 2D experiences. The “author once, deploy everywhere” capability ensures developers can publish to all of the most popular platforms. Unity Technologies boasts a thriving community of over 2.5 million developers including large publishers, indie studios, students and hobbyists. To remain at the forefront of innovation, Unity Technologies tirelessly re-invests in its award-winning 3D and 2D development tools and its democratization initiatives, such as the Asset Store digital content marketplace, Unity Cloud services, and Unity Games publishing and distribution division. Unity Technologies is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices located worldwide. For more information, visit: http://unity3d.com.

Unity product names are trademarks of Unity Technologies or its subsidiaries or affiliates. Other products or brand names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

About Imagination Technologies
Imagination is a global technology leader whose products touch the lives of billions of people throughout the world. The company’s broad range of silicon IP (intellectual property) includes the key multimedia, communications and general purpose processors needed to create the SoCs (Systems on Chips) that power all mobile, consumer, automotive, enterprise, infrastructure, IoT and embedded electronics. These are complemented by its unique software and cloud IP and system solution focus, enabling its licensees and partners get to market quickly by creating and leveraging highly differentiated SoC platforms. Imagination’s licensees include many of the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturers, network operators and OEMs/ODMs who are creating some of the world’s most iconic and disruptive products. See: www.imgtec.com.

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