New and enhanced developer tools for Android released

David McBrien, EVP Sales and Business Development, Imagination Technologies, said: “PowerVR GPUs have a significant presence in Android handsets, particularly with new chips coming to market from Unisoc and MediaTek in the coming months. It is strategically important for us to provide graphics developers with the best tools to take advantage of our GPU technology in the full range of Android devices, from low end to high end. We provide professional tools at no cost to developers because we understand that without outstanding applications, no one will buy the hardware.”

As well as helping developers to get the best performance out of the many devices with PowerVR GPUs, these tools can also help improve the development of applications for any Android phone, tablet, or OTT device.

Carlos Sarria, Senior Developer Technology Manager, Imagination Technologies, said: “Imagination has been providing powerful tools for 3D graphics development for over twenty years, backed up by our extensive technical support and documentation. Our tools are consistently ranked highly by developers thanks to our complete, fully-featured set of performance analysis, debugging, and asset optimisation utilities which are continually improved and updated.”

New versions of PVRMonitor for Unreal Engine and Unity
To make developers’ lives easier, PVRMonitor, PowerVR’s real time GPU performance monitor for Android, will shortly be available as a plug-in for Unreal Engine, with Unity support coming early next quarter.

Developers simply drag and drop the PVRMonitor widget onto their app. Once their app is launched, developers will find PVRMonitor gives a quick and easy way to view statistics such as frame rate and hardware counter values as an overlay on the development device.

With this latest version, developers now have instant access to the full range of hardware counters previously only available through PVRTune. These include cycles per pixel/vertex, texture processing load, shader units load, and dozens more.

Developers have full control over the statistics they want to see, laying out as few or as many counter graphs as they like, setting threshold values, and even setting which colours indicate high and low values for quicker interpretation.

PVRTune enhancements
PowerVR’s hardware profiler PVRTune now has Vulkan and OpenCL support, including support for visualising Vulkan debug markers.

PowerVR will be demoing the latest enhancements at GDC which also include:

• Full shader source-code profiling  
• Improvements to memory usage reporting, including new software counters for tracking application and driver memory usage
• New statistics report window
• Syntax highlighter for GLSL
• Easier deployment and direct connection to devices via the GUI

PVRStudio new features
Offering developers seamless debugging between GPU and CPU, the latest version of PowerVR’s IDE PVRStudio now offers Android deployment and debugging, with full support for OpenCL, OpenGL ES, Vulkan and more.  Other recent developments that PVRStudio now offers include:

• GPU conditional breakpoint support / conditional shader breakpoints
• Page fault capture
• Shader source and unified shading cluster (assembler) intermixed debugging
• Improved readability of unified shading cluster code and values passed to the shader

Imagination will be demonstrating these PowerVR tools at its booth, S763 at GDC 2019.