Imagination Technologies was one of the earliest developers of dedicated 3D accelerators for PCs. On Tuesday it confirmed that its BXT-32-1024 GPU has been licensed by China’s Innosilicon to create the Fantasy (Fenghua) 1 Type-A graphics card. This graphics card also sports 16GB of GDDR6X on a 128-bit interface and hits 5 TFLOPS of compute. A Type-B card is also in production, with a dual-GPU PCB offering up to twice the performance, says ImgTec.
UK-based ImgTec celebrated the 30th anniversary of PowerVR , the graphics architecture behind legendary GPUs like the Apocalypse 3D/X series on Tuesday. Imagination had announced it was getting back into the high-performance PC GPU game back in 2020, but we hadn’t heard anything very solid about developments or board partners over the last couple of years. Twitter’s Löschzwerg , who spotted this ImgTec blog, says that Fantasy 1 card in the picture is installed on an ASRock Z690 PRO RS motherboard.
In its 30th anniversary blog, ImgTec has confirmed our suspicions with regard to the Fantasy series. This is quite important, as earlier in the year Innosilicon wasn’t upfront about the GPU architecture behind its Fantasy series. Innosilicon had instead appeared to indicate to Chinese media that the Fenghua series of graphics cards were wholly “domestic desktop GPUs.”
For some hints at how well these desktop graphics cards might perform we have reports from this earlier in the year which hint that the Fantasy 1 Type A will target GeForce RTX 3060 grade performance. Moreover, we hear that the GPU has been built on the 12nm process in China, and includes HDMI 2.1, DP 1.4, and VGA outputs with multiple monitor support. The ‘double power' Fantasy 1 Type B was supposed to be officially launched at the start of August. However, we are still waiting for some solid details and benchmarking of cards like the Fantasy 1 Type A, which launched about nine months ago.
We will keep our eyes open for some more insights into PowerVR’s rebirth in China, hoping for some wider geographic spread. Meanwhile, PC graphics continues to be dominated by Nvidia and AMD, who are both queuing up exciting upgrades for the latter portion of this year. Also we can’t forget Intel, which has some decent looking mid-range firepower lined up for later in the year in the form of its Arc A750 and A770. However, we shall have to see whether they can edge into our hotly contested best graphics cards list.