Apple’s recent iPhones and iPad tablets are already among the best in the business when it comes to graphics and mobile gaming, but a new development from one of Apple’s key partners could bring huge improvements to future Apple devices.
Imagination Technologies currently supplies the graphics solutions for Apple’s latest A7 chipset, which powers the iPhone 5s, iPad Air and Retina iPad mini. Earlier this week, the company announced a brand new mobile graphics solution that will afford huge benefits over its already impressive offerings.
“For the better part of the last eight years, we have been busy developing unique hardware and software technologies to radically lower the cost and dramatically increase the efficiency and performance of ray tracing,” Imagination Technologies wrote in a post on its blog. “This work culminates at GDC 2014 with the official launch of the PowerVR Wizard GPU family, a range of IP processors that offer high-performance ray tracing, graphics and compute in a power envelope suitable for mobile and embedded use cases. This opens up the potential of highly photorealistic, computer generated imagery to a host of new real-time applications and markets not previously possible.”
According to the company’s post, the new chips will offer more realistic lighting and shadows by utilizing new ray-tracing technology in addition to standard rasterization. “Ray tracing” is a hybrid graphics rendering process that is able to display subtle lighting changes in near-real time.
The company’s new graphics solutions will not be available to partners until sometime next year, which means that Apple’s iPhone 6 and rumored iPhone phablet will not be able to take advantage of these new advancements. The iPhone 6s, iPhone 7 or whatever else Apple launches in 2015 and beyond, however, could certainly make use of these new graphics packages.
