Claimed to halve memory bandwidth and footprint, the IP block targets SoC development for consumer applications to meet the needs of the higher resolution demanded by 4K and 8K displays, as well as the battery life for consumer products.  Nigel Leeder, executive vice president, PowerVR, Imagination, said: “By introducing visually lossless compression into our GPUs, we can now guarantee a reduction in memory bandwidth and usage.”

The dual-pipeline framebuffer compression engine has a new lossy pipeline which is only used if the lossless pipeline falls short of 50% compression, so that even ‘noisy’ images can be compressed with high fidelity. There is also a decision logic block which determines which output should be used to guarantee the compression ratio. Algorithms ensure the image quality change is imperceptible, says Imagination.