Beyond benchmarks: potential PSP 2 GPU candidate churns out tech demo images

If you've been following the recent chronicles about that PSP 2 rumor, here's some more fodder. Image renders have surfaced from labs of Imagination Technology, the guys who are supposedly providing the graphics chip for the PSP 2, showing the potential of the SGX core.

If you've been following the recent chronicles about that PSP 2 rumor, here's some more fodder. Image renders have surfaced from labs of Imagination Technology, the guys who are supposedly providing the graphics chip for the PSP 2.

Everything started the other day with Imagination announcing via press release that they've signed a deal with a new partner (read: Sony, sources say) and that they're cooking up a new graphics chip, the SGX55x graphics core. Just to give you an idea of what's expected of this next-gen chip, here are the current specs that we know off:

CURRENT PSP GPU Specifications:

• 166 mhz core speed
• 2 MB VRAM
• Up to 33 million polygons per second
• 664 million pixels per second (fill rate)

CURRENT PowerVR SGX530 Specifications:

• 200 MHz Core Speed
• 13.5 million polygons per second
• 1200 million pixels per second (fill rate)
• DirectX 9 Shader Model 3 support / OpenGL 2.0
• 128-bit color precision
• Multi-sampling and anti-aliasing

Powerful? Yes. But apparently, that's not enough. Amp those specs to a small scale RSX chip much like the ones found in PS3 units. That's the potential of the SGX55x. (Or so they say, with the GPU's unified shader architecture and OpenGL 2.0 support.)

The images you see below are tech demos of what Imagination Technology's SGX GPU is capable of in the realm of pixel shading.

  

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Related articles:

• Sony comments on PSP 2 speculation: no comment
  
• Rumor: Imagination Technologies working on graphics processor for new PSP?

Via PSPWorld