Imagination announces the first next generation GPUs that will end up in 2013 smartphones and tablets

Imagination Technologies has just unveiled the PowerVR G6200 and G6400 graphics processors, the first GPUs to use the new PowerVR Rogue architecture. What does this mean for you? The company claims that these new GPUs will deliver “20x or more” the performance that today’s PowerVR5 series GPUs use today. Who uses Imagination’s processors? Apple does in the A4 and A5, Texas Instruments does in the OMAP3 and OMAP4, and even Intel uses Imagination’s stuff in their Atom platforms. Now before you get too excited, note that there’s typically a lead time of about one year between when new GPUs get announced and when they actually end up in devices you can buy from your local electronics store. Don’t expect to see the PowerVR G6200 or G6400 in the Apple iPad 3 or iPhone 5 or the next Nexus device that’ll likely be announced and ship during the last few weeks of this year.

So down to the nitty gritty, what do these new GPUs do that the old ones can’t? According to Anandtech, a whole lot. Open GL ES support jumps up from version 2.0 of the specification, which was in the PowerVR5 Series, to version 3.0; DirectX support goes from 9.3 to 11.1; and there’s still a whole lot more that Imagination simply doesn’t want to talk about yet. Expect to see games on your smartphone and/or tablet look about as good as the best that the XBOX 360 can push out today. Hopefully game designers will be able to fully exploit the amount of horsepower that’ll be at their disposable without needing to invest an insane amount of man hours creating textures and all that.

Anyway, what’s really going to happen with all this GPU speed? Expect to see interfaces become more fluid and crazier in terms of the type of effects that they’ll be using. Yes, that means more animated whizz bang unnecessary graphics, but applied in moderation they can actually be a good thing.