Imagination Technologies is a name you might not know, but you use their products every day. They make the PowerVR architecture that powers iOS devices. And they announced PowerVR Furian, a new GPU architecture that promises 4K graphics performance on mobile, with “up to a 70-90% improvement in real-world gaming performance by density, including 35% better shader performance and 80% better fill rate, compared to a similar sized and clocked Series7XT Plus GPU based on current-generation PowerVR Rogue architecture." This all according to our sister site MacRumors. Note that the first PowerVR Furian architecture GPUs will be available mid-2017, but real-world devices with Furian won’t be available until the end of 2018.
What would this mean for games? Well, it might not mean a huge revolution. It might mean existing games look nicer. Like, when Oz: Broken Kingdom (Free) came out with iPhone 7 graphics support. That game was available on previous iOS devices and works fine. Even Vainglory (Free), the iPhone 6 superstar, worked fine on older devices. That’s kind of the limiting factor here: there’s a ton of devices to support. And many mobile games just don’t need all that much horsepower. Perhaps some more console/PC ports will make their way to later devices with the additional overhead they’ll have, but don’t expect a grand 4K gaming revolution on mobile, necessarily. Maybe web designers will now have more horsepower with which to make more inefficient webpages and display more obnoxious mobile ads. Which, considering we don’t do that, means you should probably consider our Patreon?
