POWERVR SGX520, the world’s smallest OpenGL ES 2.0 core achieves Khronos conformance

POWERVR SGX520, the world’s smallest OpenGL ES 2.0 core achieves Khronos conformance

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The news is a little old but as this blog is new, its worth noting. PowerVR is a direct competitor to ARM Mali for licensing in set top boxes. Its evident that OpenGL ES 2.0 is coming to set top boxes which means 3D and shaders. Shaders are a sort of programmable hardware targetted at graphics and are the direction all desktop 3D is taking both in OpenGL and DirectX. They allow the application writer (from C or Java) to submit mini programs to be run directly on the graphics hardware for maximum performance. This could be anything from a video filter to a reflective water effect.

Shaders mean that future set top box coder teams must include at least one true graphics expert. Thats a few years yet though.