Imagination Pushes DXD Graphics into PC Gaming To Challenge NVIDIA and AMD

It feels like I write a story about Imagination Technologies about once a year. ImgTec, as it's often called, is a company with a storied history, emerging as one of the founders of the PC gaming 3D accelerator ecosystem, before going on to assist Apple in its rise to iPhone dominance and then being summarily kicked to the curb. Now, the house of PowerVR seems poised to make another push into the world of PC gaming, but even as a long-time Kyro fanboy, I remain dubious about ImgTec's ability to pull it off.

This story comes to us from an unusual source: Jon Peddie Research, who points out a blog post that ImgTec put up back in March which we somehow missed. The blog post is simply titled "Imagination Demonstrates DirectX Gaming on D-Series GPUs," and it includes a short YouTube embed of what is purported to be a GPU based on Imagination DXD IP running the venerable 3DMark Fire Strike demo.

So what's exciting or newsworthy about that? Well, Imagination Technologies hasn't been selling high-end graphics products for a very long time, and arguably it never did. Despite being a true pioneer in 3D graphics when it was known as VideoLogic, the company left the PC space in 2002 after the launch of its last PC accelerator card, the STG4800 Kyro II SE. The company found it challenging to scale its tile-based architecture, which has critical advantages but also major disadvantages versus more conventional graphics chips from NVIDIA and AMD (the graphics division of which was known as ATI Technologies back then.)


Given that Intel has largely withdrawn from the PC gaming GPU market (at least temporarily), we could really use a serious third player in the gaming GPU space. ImgTec's demo proves that its architecture is indeed capable of running DirectX 11 software. As Jon Peddie points out, though, that's really just the cover charge for getting into the gaming GPU market; a significant milestone, but hardly a groundbreaking achievement. It's probably worth noting that ImgTec's website for its graphics IP specifically says that its DXD architecture supports DirectX 11, DirectX 12, Vulkan 1.4, and OpenGL 4.6 "for gaming on PCs, cloud, Windows apps, and mobile ports."

The big problem is that PowerVR doesn't sell GPUs anymore. Unlike NVIDIA and AMD, who create their own GPU chip designs, have them fabricated by a company like TSMC, and then sell them to companies like ASUS, MSI, and PowerColor (among many others), Imagination Technologies is strictly a GPU IP licensor. That means it sells its technology to chip designers for them to implement into their products. You can think of it as being analogous to Arm, because Arm historically didn't make its own processors.

Because of that, Arm and ImgTec share the same struggle in that it's very difficult to talk about how good either company's technology actually is given that the performance and features of any GPU based on ImgTec IP are inevitably tied to the engineering of whatever chipmaker licenses the PowerVR IP, not just the PowerVR design itself.


Regarding the demo (embedded above), I have to say that the performance showcased isn't encouraging. 3DMark Fire Strike came out eleven years ago, which is an eternity in the technology world. Modern GPUs sneer at it; even a low-end integrated GPU can handle Fire Strike with aplomb. The performance in ImgTec's video is lackluster, with significant hitches and overall low framerates. Accordingly, the company cropped the feed tightly so as to avoid showing the framerate counter.

To be fair, we don't know what specific GPU the demo was being run on. It's almost certainly a GPU from one of ImgTec's numerous Chinese partners, including Moore Threads, Innosilicon, or more likely, Xiangdixian, better known as "XDX". We say "more likely" because while ImgTec doesn't say as much in its blog post, it does link the text "now available in silicon" to a blog post where it announces the XDX partnership.

Then, which XDX GPU? Good question. The company has previously released two products based on PowerVR IP, the Tianjun-1 and Tianjun-2, neither of which entered mass production and neither of which were particularly impressive. XDX demonstrated a GPU last year at the ICCAD Expo trade show that it was calling the Fuxi A0, but besides some wild specification claims (including compute throughput of 160 TFLOPs, a number that dwarfs even the GeForce RTX 5090's 105 TFLOPs) there's been little to show for it.

So maybe the demo is running on Fuxi A0? If so, the drivers seem woefully undercooked, or the GPU itself is simply nowhere near as powerful as claimed. (Notably, the Fuxi A0 demo sample only had a single 8-pin power connector.) Either way, it makes this announcement hard to get excited about even as someone who actually stuck with a PowerVR Kyro II card way after its expiration date, which was arguably before it even launched. Hopefully ImgTec can find a partner who is capable of executing on its IP in a meaningful way, because I'd genuinely love to review a PowerVR graphics card again for the first time in 25 years.