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PowerVR's tile rendering breaks down the display into a series of rectangular tiles. The main benefit is that the card doesn't render anything that's obscured by another object in front, which improves performance.

The PowerVR technology is owned by Imagination Technologies, now famous for its DAB radios, and details of the new chips emerged from a presentation at the company's AGM on 26 July 2006.

The presentation claims that the chips will

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'exceed MS Shader Model 3 requirements', and will also exceed the shader requirements of OpenGL 2. That level of performance would rival the current parts from Nvidia and ATi. The presentation labels the cores as 'Portable/Desktop Computing Cores.'

We haven't seen a PowerVR PC graphics chip since the Kyro II in 2001, which impressively out-performed Nvidia's GeForce 2 MX GPU for a similar price. However, Imagination Technologies has still kept a finger in the 3D graphics pie during its five-year hiatus from the PC arena by developing its PowerVR SGX technologies for mobiles and handhelds.

Many have speculated that Intel will be using PowerVR technology in future integrated graphics chipsets, as it already licenses the PowerVR SGX technology. However, David Harold, the PR manager for Imagination Technologies, told Custom PC that 'I'm not able to confirm where they [Intel] are using it, which is perhaps why these rumours have started. I can, however, certainly say that the upcoming Intel integrated parts aren't PowerVR based.'