Non-PowerVR devices

PowerVR Insider
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1

Hi,

New to the PowerVR SDK here and sorry for the basic question. We’re looking to develop using OpenGL ES2 for Android. We have so far played with the PC emulation version of the SDK and are impressed. Is the PowerVR SDK usable for non-PowerVR devices, such as the HTC Incredible? If so, should we use the Android version of the SDK (even though the download site lists only PowerVR devices as being compatible)?

In general, I’m wondering how PowerVR-specific the SDK is. I know pvrtc textures are PowerVR-only, but other than that?

Thanks,
Harry

2

As mobile platforms, generally, conform to standard APIs then the emulation and other areas of the POWERVR SDK are, generally, applicable to other platforms.

PVRTC is an obvious area of incompatibility as are any other extensions from ourselves or from other vendors. Comparing extension header files should give a good idea of what is different in this respect. Note that shader capabilities may be different too. There will be other obvious discrepancies such as in our performance recommendations and shader instruction counts in the shader editor.

Note that our texture utilities (PVRTexTool), geometry exporter(PVRGeoPOD/Collada2POD), shader editor, API trace tool (PVRTrace) and others will still be largely applicable. PVRVFrame also has a generic profile that should help it be useful. The PVRShell is provided in source code and is extendable to other platforms (and if you use this you get the benefit of software compatibility with all the POWERVR platforms we support). The PVRTools library is designed to be cross platform so this should work as well.

Obviously, we don't directly support these other platforms so code is not tested and project files/build configurations aren't provided, however.

As an Android phone, I suppose starting from our Android SDK would make sense for the Incredible. Targetting POWERVR platforms would seem to make even more sense, though...Wink

Gordon2010-10-13 11:12:31
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Thanks a lot Gordon. It appears that the cross-platform aspect looks fairly good for the SDK. We’ve started trying out the Android version on Incredible. Will post back if we need more help!

Harry