Mobile Phones Will Be Capable Of PS3-quality Graphics In Three Years

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Anybody who was into building their own computers in the mid-90′s probably at least vaguely remembers Imagination Technologies (formerly VideoLogic) who produced PC graphics cards. They were forced out of the market by NVIDIA and ATI and their last hurrah on the big scale was on Sega’s Dreamcast console. They’ve retreated to the realm of small devices like UMPCs and smartphones, and they’re telling us to expect PS3 quality graphics in just three years.

You can find Imagination Technolgies’ PowerVR in such popular mobile phones like the iPhone and Motorola Droid. They’re promising some big developments in the next three years. By using multi-cores in their GPUs, they say they can really push  he envelope regarding mobile graphics – which we usually think of as limited. They say they can fit three or four GPU cores into a phone with an increased demand in battery consumption.

According to an interview with Gizmodo, Imagination Technologies said that they’re currently designing multi-core GPUs that will be able to deliver 720p PS3-quality video rendering to mobile phones. While that 720p would have to be downscaled for modern phones – Imagination Tech says we’ll be able to output it to a TV via HDMI, or, they predict, some mobile phones will have native 720p displays by then.

Imagination Tech has also been working on the OpenCL standard – which is an open standard that allows applications that traditionally only use the main CPU to use extra cycles from the GPU. Both ATI and NVIDIA have chatted about this before, too, so it’s something we’ll see more frequently in general.