It's that time of year again, where Imagination Technologies announces its plans to make your gaming graphics look even more awesome, and we translate all the numbers and letters to deliver the cold, hard facts.
This year is a big one - Imagination is introducing a new family of GPUs called the Series7XT, consisting of five different variants.
Chip's challenge
This is also a big leap forward for smartphone and tablet gaming, which will benefit hugely from the graphical improvements in much the same way, although performance will sit more around the level of the Xbox 360 and PS3.
However, features such as full hardware support for tessellation and superior texture compression format will now be part of the package. Imagination's PowerVr graphics processors are a big part of Apple's iPhones, so this potentially means a significant graphical leap in the iPhone 7, if not the iPhone 6S.
The awesome features don't stop there; this is now the only family of mobile GPUs on the market that offers virtualisation. This is a feature that allows a device to run multiple operating systems, and could play a significant role with the arrival of Valve's Steam Machines.
Voica told us that it usually takes "between a year and a half to two years" from the moment a partner licences a GPU to when they ship a working product, so don't expect to see chips based on the new GPUs showing up in 2014. However, Voica said we might start seeing the new GPUs early next year.
Still, it's a leap forward that should make Sony and Microsoft realise that they might soon have a lot more to worry about than just each other.
