Apple to Phase Out Usage of Imagination Technologies GPU
If you need a refresher, Apple has been using PowerVR GPUs from Imagination ever since the original iPhone. More than that, though, it is the only outside technology (and a significant one, at that) that is and has always been an explicit dependency for iOS apps: readers of this blog don’t need to be reminded of Apple’s insistence to own every single aspect of the iOS platform (if you missed the previous episodes, most of it is in my iPhone shenanigans category) so as not to let anyone (Microsoft, Adobe, whoever) get leverage over them, but graphical technologies have been a notable exception, being more than mere software. For instance, while Apple uses OpenGL ES, and now Metal, to abstract away the GPU, a number of PowerVR-specific extensions have always been available and Apple encouraged their use.
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Besides the extensions developers explicitly use, there are all the performance aspects and tradeoffs specific to PowerVR that iOS games have unwittingly become dependent upon (e.g. whether to use complex geometry or compensate with shaders, how to best obtain some effects, etc.), which Apple would have to best reproduce, or at least not regress on, in a new GPU.
